Likewise, John’s history with his abusive father is mined for a character-based shock or two, but the film never connects it to Miles’ plight in any meaningful way. Sarah and John drink in their car on date night and muse about giving up their hard-partying lives for parenthood, but neither the characters nor the film bring this point up again. While there are a couple of interesting visual tricks up McCarthy’s sleeve throughout (Sarah seeing a distinctly different face over Miles’ own is the film’s one great scare), the film half-considers most of its ideas without ever meaningfully developing them. Likewise, even if Scott is tasked with delivering some pretty distateful dialogue, even for a kid in a hard-R horror flick like this one, the young actor manages to find speeds between cherubic and sinister, turning Miles’ slow transformation into a frightened child’s losing battle with his own brain.Ĭoming of Age: However, too little else about The Prodigy distinguishes itself aside from its performers. Schilling is an able horror lead in this respect in addition to serving up some exceptional “scream face” in the later part of the movie, the Orange is the New Black star brings a trembling anxiety to her performance that elevates the stakes even when much of the film’s stiff storytelling falls short. While her husband John ( Peter Mooney) is mostly present to be more immediately panicked about Miles than Sarah and/or disappear for long chunks of the film, Sarah is the one who has to convey many of the film’s low-budget shocks through physicality alone. The Pains of Childbirth: Going back to the days of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the horror genre has long mined chills from one of the simplest, most arguably unanswerable questions there is: what if you had a truly evil child? At what point does parental love have to give way to the rational prevention of that evil’s spread? The Prodigy doesn’t break any new ground in the field of horror films about loving mothers forced into the unspeakable to protect their children, but director Nicholas McCarthy ably builds a strong sense of escalating dread out of Sarah’s slow realization that Miles may not only be dangerous, but also some level of aware of it.Ī great deal of that dread emerges from the pair of leading performances at its center. Soon, Sarah’s absolute love for her child will be pushed to gruesome extremes, as she attempts to help Miles before losing him for good to whatever else might be inside her son’s head. But by the time he turns 8, his intelligence begins to manifest itself in more unsettling forms, from fits of violence to Miles speaking in strange tongues in his bedroom, insistent that a presence has been passing in and out of his body. As Miles gets older, he demonstrates remarkable intelligence, even as his social skills consistently lag behind.
In suburban Pennsylvania, Sarah ( Taylor Schilling) gives birth to a healthy baby boy and names him Miles ( Jackson Robert Scott).
Movie music prodigy boy serial#
In rural Ohio, a notorious serial killer known for abducting, dismembering, and eventually killing his young female victims is killed in a police raid. The Pitch: On a fateful night in 2010, two events take place simultaneously.
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