#PRODIGY MOVIE MOVIE#
Watch Video: Siri-Like Phone Assistant Is Out for Blood in Slasher Movie 'AMI' Trailer (Exclusive) Because whatever deity is in charge of reincarnation in the “Prodigy” universe has a penchant for signing their work. And just in case the juxtaposition of an evil man’s death and the birth of a new baby wasn’t clear enough, Edward Scarka also had heterochromia.
#PRODIGY MOVIE SERIAL#
Miles was born at the exact same time as a despicable serial killer, Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux, “Frontier”), was shot dead by the police. The audience, however, knows exactly what’s wrong from the film’s opening minutes. There’s something terribly wrong with Miles, but Sarah just can’t figure out what it is. He also has a nasty tendency to beat his fellow students with a wrench.
Taylor Schilling stars as Sarah, a woman whose eight-year-old child Miles (Jackson Robert Scott, “It: Chapter One”) has heterochromia (one eye is a different color than the other), and a genius-level intelligence.
If the idea of a serial-killing pre-teen terrifies you, this film might give off some shivers, but “The Prodigy” doesn’t add anything terribly new to the recipe. Young Scott consistently punches well above his weight, imbuing Miles with both adroitly feigned innocence and unsettling malevolence.There’s no shortage of films about evil children, so at the risk of indulging in hyperbole, let’s just say Nicholas McCarthy’s “The Prodigy” is the latest. By the time Miles’ afflictions become acute, Schilling’s performance as a mother reaching her wit’s end starts to take on palpable panic, culminating in a desperate decision. McCarthy maintains firm control of a heightened visual style throughout that nonetheless lacks an emphasis on genre conventions, draining the pic of tension and interest.ĭragging Schilling through all this confusion seems like a shame, and it takes her a while to gain her bearings as the film fritters away precious screen time. McCarthy, also a horror vet, previously directed his original titles At the Devil’s Door and The Pact, so it’s a bit puzzling to consider what went wrong here, other than perhaps a crisis of overconfidence. At the same time, there are hints of supernatural forces at work along the lines of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby or Twin Peaks that aren’t adequately distinguished from the other menacing influences plaguing Miles. This karmic transference also lacks any particular justification besides the obvious expediency of putting a child in peril.
Although Buhler introduces the malevolent presence threatening Miles in the opening scenes, there’s never any clear reason why the boy becomes its victim, other than being born at an unlucky time. Originally titled Descendant, the script by horror specialist Jeff Buhler seems like it was tossed off between assignments penning higher-profile projects like the upcoming Pet Sematary remake and another adaptation of The Grudge. The results are so shocking that the psychologist comes to believe that Miles and his parents may be in mortal danger from the being seeking to absorb the child’s personality. Not that his parents actually believe that could be possible, but as Miles becomes increasingly distressed, Sarah agrees to let Jacobson perform hypnosis on him in order to regress his memories. When he begins exhibiting more aberrant behavior, Sarah takes him to psychologist Arthur Jacobson (Colm Feore), who provides a startling diagnosis: Miles’ mind may be in the grip of a reincarnated entity seeking to take control of his body. That isn’t a huge issue for his parents, who are Miles’ most frequent companions, but his antisocial attitude concerns them. Their only child Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), born with an unusually high IQ that sets him apart from most other children, attends third grade at a private school for gifted kids, where he has difficulty making friends, preferring to focus on art projects instead. The film’s cardinal sin isn’t so much that it’s unoriginal as that it’s so uninvolving, it almost assures attention deficit will set in early, as audiences begin to wonder about the downside of parenting for well-off couple Sarah ( Taylor Schilling) and John (Peter Mooney). Struggling throughout with issues of structure and pacing, Nicholas McCarthy’s horror feature threatens to debase standards for the genre to levels that even undiscriminating thrill-seekers seem likely to reject. Karma is a killer in The Prodigy, a woefully inadequate interpretation of the tenets of reincarnation and their impact on one innocent family.