Joshua

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Suck it, The Orphanage.

Was it just last week that I was bemoaning the failure of that creepy-child movie to engage me despite its aspirations? Indeed it was. I even went so far as to wonder if it might just be creepier to have a crazy kid instead of another kid that could see ghosts.

Joshua is just that, a straightforward scary-kid themed movie with no supernatural bent, in the proud tradition of The Bad Seed and, uh, Macaulay Culkin's The Good Son. Oh, and let's not forget Mikey, which is the one where the kid from Blank Check murders his whole family and then gets a new family and murders all them and then blows their house up with dynamite that he somehow had. (4/24/2009, Note from the future: I Saw "Mikey" again and it turns out he uses a molotov cocktail and not dynamite. My bad.)

Maybe it's not the most auspicious subgenre, but Joshua is a top-notch example. It's probably the most tense, involving horror film I've seen in a long time, and if I didn't have some reservations with the ending I'd be giving it even higher praise. As it stands, it gets the status of Minor Classic.

What I loved about the first 2/3rds of Joshua is what a slow burn it is, and how for a while it's more of a dark character piece that only gradually tips itself towards horror. The tension builds under the surface of mundane, plausible events. The new baby seems to cry too much at night. Mom is suffering from post-partum depression and is slowly losing it. There's tension at work for dad... and is he having an affair? And then there's little Joshua, much too smart for a 9-year-old, and so strangely calculating... is he dangerous, or just strange?

The last chunk of the movie starts to feel a little less plausible... in particular I'm not sure the father would lose his shit so dramatically, and then the plot works itself out a little too neatly SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT making Joshua a little too Hannibal Lector-y. But even then the tension and the creepiness never diminishes, so it's not a wash. And at least it doesn't turn out that Joshua is a demon child with an imaginary friend that's actually a ghost but really the father has split personalities and he's the crazy one, or some shit.

I have mixed feelings about the final scene, which has a lot of creepy touches, especially the reveal of the fate of his pet hamster. But the big button on the ending is little Joshua playing the piano and singing a creepy song to his uncle that pretty much confesses his guilt. I can't figure out why the hell Joshua would write a song about how evil he is, and then sing it to someone who he is pretending to be normal in front of. I mean, seriously, Joshua, you masterminded this whole plan to destroy your family and look completely innocent, why are you writing mopey songs about your guilt? And it doesn't help that the song sucks. It was written by Dave Matthews, who then performs it over the credits. I mean, no bias against Matthews here, although we all know his music sucks dick, etc etc, but he theortically could have written an ok song. And I guess the song strikes the right mood, but the lyrics are atrociously on-the-nose and makes this bad idea stick out even worse.

You know what might have worked? Joshua playing some creepy music on the piano but not singing. We don't need any corny lyrics about pulling wings off of flies and shit.

So I think what we have here is 3/4ths of a great horror movie that stumbles in its finale. But it's still totally worthwhile. It's well made and tense, with some strong acting (god I love Sam Rockwell) and not without a solid dose of dark humor (whihc helps make some of the less plausible moments palatable). Remember when I said The Orphanage was exactly the kind of mature, serious, themetically rich and artistic kind of horror film that I've been looking for, only it just didn't work at all as horror? Well, Joshua is all that too, but it works and is actually a scary movie.