Joshua
Directed by George Ratliff
In its early scenes, Joshua exudes the faint aura of a family drama. Director George Ratliff proceeds to segue into the immersive intensity of a thriller, provoke some laughs, veer into horror and conclude with haunting intimacy. The story of an eponymous child prodigy intent on driving his well-intentioned parents insane, Joshua conveys, on paper, any of these categorized sensibilities. That it manages to toy with all of them without falling apart testifies to Ratliff’s attention to detail and our own willingness to follow his lead. It would seem misleading to consider such a deeply encoded narrative solely in terms of the degree to which it conforms to a spectrum of genre boundaries, but Joshua intentionally generates an enigmatic aura of mismatched storytelling cadences as a means of studying the frustration of childhood supposition. To that end, it’s a wonderful mess.
Slow in its progress but consistently engaging, the plot hints at Joshua’s jealous rage over the presence of an infant sibling who usurps his parent’s attention, but the camera hovers just on the edge of his subjectivity. There’s plenty of guesswork necessary to figure out why, somewhere near the middle half, Joshua incorporates maternal tensions straight out of Rosemary’s Baby. The child’s unsettlingly calculated method of inflicting emotional breakdowns on his beleaguered parents imbues him with a demonic sensibility straight out of The Omen. But these undulating tones create the surprisingly volatile atmosphere of a child at play—toying with the reality of his family dynamics the way most kids fiddle with action figures. If nothing else, the movie offers neglectful babysitters a cautionary plea for perceptiveness.
Joshua survives its muddled experimentation with homage and mystery primarily due to the ability of its cast to play it straight through all the mood changes. Newcomer Jacob Cogan has a small frame and dark, cagey eyes, allowing him to frightfully embody a sense of alienated youth. As his emotionally unstable mother, Vera Farmiga conveys her character’s fragility with a queasy softness to her physicality. Sam Rockwell, a fine actor still in the process of broadening his range, makes a fantastic father on the brink of losing his mind (look for him playing a similar role in David Gordon Green’s soon-to-be-released Snow Angels).
Ratliff manipulates the three central characters like chess pieces, shifting the focus of sympathy from Joshua to his parents and back again. It becomes gradually apparent that the child has a calculated method for inciting chaos, but his advanced tactical approach borders on the edge of ludicrousness, considering his age.
Joshua is best enjoyed as a collage of symbolism, a manner of grappling with the parallels between prepubescent naiveté and the self-importance associated with young adulthood. The family’s lavish Manhattan lifestyle comes crashing down in the face of inner dysfunction. With his freakishly roundabout technique, Ratliff suggests that the older we get, the harder we fall.
