Beyond the Multiplex

"Joshua": Manhattan parenting as a horror show (the truth hurts)
There's an inherent marketing problem with George Ratliff's canny little chiller "Joshua," which is shot in the medium-bright lighting and decorous interiors of mid-period Woody Allen but is even more frightening than that suggests. Only viewers with some appreciation for the odd, bloodless character of moneyed family life in New York will really understand how hilarious and deadly accurate this movie is. But then again, New York parents are the last people who will want to see it.

When Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby (Vera Farmiga), uptown parents of a piano prodigy named Joshua (Jacob Kogan), attend the music recital at their son's uptight, suit-and-tie elementary school, they nervously reassure themselves that they aren't "those people." They mean the rich, white, status-obsessed young Establishment parents sitting all around them. Many of us have made remarks like that to ourselves and our spouses, perhaps in less rarefied circumstances. We are "those people" on the outside, but we retain some inner core of our bohemian, quasi-rebellious post-collegiate selves.

Except maybe we don't. "Joshua" is an oft-told tale in the horror genre, the story of an unloved older child who seeks revenge (or at least a redress of perceived injury) on his parents and newborn sibling. But the ingenuity of George Ratliff's film (co-written with David Gilbert) lies in its complicated interplay of emotion and sympathy, not in its standard-issue plotting. Nine-year-old Joshua is a strange and morbid kid whose behavior borders on the diabolical. He may be hatching an ingenious plan to destroy the family that has afflicted him with a baby sister. But if he is, he has his reasons.

There's nothing so exceptional about Brad and Abby, which may be why the movie is so creepily effective. Operating with reasonably good intentions and a normal mixture of selfishness and stupidity, they have somehow concocted a toxic home environment. Brad's away all the time at his soulless finance job and spends the rest of his time in a cocoon of iTunes classic rock or TV sports. Abby's spiraling down into postpartum depression, crippling migraines and possible psychotic delusions. Their baby girl has gotten colicky, after a few peaceful early weeks, and won't stop crying. Joshua sits in the living room practicing Bartók, and his teacher thinks he should skip a grade (or two). Even before anything bad happens, his parents are pretty scared of him and grateful for every chance to ignore him.

There are a lot of clues about what's really happening as Joshua's family becomes increasingly unglued, but they don't all point in the same direction. Joshua becomes more and more fascinated by Egyptian mummies and disembowels his teddy bears to preserve them for eternity. School guinea pigs and household pets die mysteriously. He screws up his piano recital on purpose, and only Abby's brother, the playwright and composer Ned (Dallas Roberts), has any inkling of why. Ned, in fact, is another stock character -- the gay uncle, brother, cousin or friend -- handled with great subtlety here. Without consciously intending to, he essentially becomes Joshua's accomplice in detonating this nuclear family.

Brad eventually discovers a cache of night-vision videos suggesting that Joshua has indeed been awake late at night, roaming the huge apartment in pursuit of sinister errands. But those aren't the first found videos in the movie. Joshua has already watched his parents' old VHS tapes of his babyhood, when he cried far worse than his sister has ever done and his mom suffered a crashing, sobbing breakdown. The conclusions his precocious 9-year-old brain draws about this family and his role in it are not, on the face of things, unreasonable.

There is nearly no violence or gore in "Joshua," but its crisis is all the more tense and terrifying because of that. Brad and Abby are far from the worst parents in the world, but they're lazy, inattentive, fearful and more than a little ambivalent about the whole thing -- and in this morality play, all those highly normal deficiencies come back to bite them in the ass. (I told you parents will dread this film.) Brad's born-again mother is mostly a frightful hysteric, but she's quite right when she proclaims, "This is a building. This is an apartment. It's not a home."

Joshua may do some unforgivable things in his demented quest to reorder his family. (Ratliff wisely refrains from explaining everything.) But he's not alone. The scariest moment comes early in the film, when Abby and Brad are just beginning to suspect that Joshua is a dangerous freak. He's going out to give away toys to the poor -- by himself, in New York, at age 9. He turns at the door and says, "Mommy? Daddy? I love you." They stare at him and don't say anything. Whatever happens after that, they had it coming.

"Joshua" opens July 6 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.

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