screening
Joshua
DIRECTOR > George Ratliff
[3/3]
It's actually kind of amazing that it took until 2007 for someone to combine two of the creepiest, "creepy-kid" movies of all time-The Omen and Rosemary's Baby-into anything even remotely marketable, but director/co-writer George Ratliff, the man behind the 2001 God-squad doc Hell House, has actually pulled it off. The result is a nearly pitch-perfect psychological thriller that knowingly references both of its predecessors without devolving into limp-wristed thievery or unintentional parody. In other words: Damien Thorn, meet Joshua Cairn (Kogan)-piano prodigy and stoic, homicidal 9-year-old sociopath. When well-heeled power-broker Brad (Rockwell) and Upper West Side house-mom Abby (Farmiga, fresh off her turn as Damon's girlfriend and DiCaprio's therapist in The Departed) have another baby, their formerly only son gets weird, Polanski-style, methodically instigating a post-partum war of attrition that eventually pushes his family past the psychic tipping point into stone-cold fucking crazy. The most impressive part about it-besides Kogan's chillingly expressionless performance and a left-field cameo from Michael McKean (as Brad's corporate-cynic boss)-is that if you've seen Joshua's stylistic/thematic progenitors, you know almost exactly where it's going, and it still creeps you out. ALT
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