Joshua

A long lineage of evil-child movies — from "The Bad Seed" to "The Exorcist" to "The Omen" — has spawned "Joshua," which is at once familiar and yet startlingly inventive and thrilling.

The feature debut from director and co-writer George Ratliff, best known for the documentary "Hell House," is a tantalizing, tense thriller in the most genteel of settings, which adds to the suspense.

Hedge-fund manager Brad Cairn (Sam Rockwell) and his wife, Abby (Vera Farmiga), have just brought their newborn daughter home to their high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side when strange things begin happening. The baby won't stop crying and Abby can't sleep; in her increasingly fragile state, she turns reluctantly to pills for comfort. Then she starts feeling paranoid, and Farmiga makes it seem as if she's slowly losing her grasp on reality, right before your eyes.

Most of the action takes place inside the apartment, and Ratliff makes great use of its long, dark hallway. There's also construction going on upstairs, and the incessant buzzing and pounding add to the sense of claustrophobia.

In the middle of all this turmoil is the couple's 9-year-old son, Joshua (played by the subtly creepy Jacob Kogan), a serious, sensitive boy with a talent for the piano and a flair for the dramatic. He always seems to be around when horrific events occur (the pet rats die in his classroom, for example), but he never seems directly responsible. And some of his potential red-flag behavior, like disemboweling his stuffed animals, could just be a normal case of a child acting out to get attention.

We know better — or at least we know enough to be suspicious. We've been down this cinematic road more than a few times before.

What makes "Joshua" different, besides the haunting cinematography from Benoit Debie with its deep reds and blues, is the way Ratliff and co-writer David Gilbert have developed their characters. The parents don't just stand by feebly while their world disintegrates — they react like real people. And Joshua isn't obviously menacing from the start. He just seems understandably jealous and a little sad. He's a bit of a misfit with his perfect hair, impeccably preppy clothes, and intellectual curiosity beyond his years. It kinda makes you feel sorry for him — for a while, at least.

"Do you ever feel weird about me, your weird son?" Joshua asks one night as his dad is tucking him into bed. Brad reacts supportively, lovingly, the way any good father would. But Rockwell, who has made a career out of characters on the edge of reason, gives the role more nuance than you might expect. He offers a hint at what Brad was like before he was someone's husband and father — back when he was still fun and maybe a little crazy.

Celia Weston is doting and eerie at the same time as Brad's know-it-all mother, Hazel, a born-again Christian who wants the baby to be baptized, much to the annoyance of Abby, who is Jewish. And Dallas Roberts makes the most of sporadic supporting appearances as Abby's gay brother, Ned, a Broadway producer who supports Joshua's obvious musical talent. He's also the first to recognize what's going on when Joshua intentionally mangles "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" during a school concert.

The moment is chilling. But if "Joshua" doesn't frighten you, it'll at least make you think twice about having kids.

The psycho kid flick -- from The Bad Seed to The Good Son -- tends to wallow in precocious camp and cheap devil child thrills. George Ratliff's Joshua attempts to revitalize the genre by injecting an element of realism. When his mom Abby (Vera Farmiga) and dad Brad (Sam Rockwell) give birth to a baby girl, Joshua (Jacob Kogan) starts to worry that not only will he have to share attention with his sister, but that his flowering sociopath tendencies will alienate him from his parents. A Bartok-loving piano prodigy who is terrible at sports and a model student, Joshua is the kind of sensitive but bright young boy routinely ostracized for his intelligence. He worries about being "weird," a stranger in his own home. Could such a kid really be ripe for serial killing? At its scariest, during the slow build of off screen "accidents," Joshua plays off the neuroses of the child's neo-yuppie Upper East Side parents. Abby, acting out a kind of post-partum Rosemary's Baby, gradually goes insane trying to care for the newborn, who won't stop crying, and Brad soon follows. Is Joshua threatening the baby? Rockwell delivers the most tonally appropriate performance as Brad, the kind of well-meaning iPod sporting dad, who is sympathetic and annoyingly self-centered at the same time. There is a dirty thrill in watching his world fall apart. But the insanity quickly gets irritating. There's a lot of screeching. Whether or not a parent is acting "crazy" in a given scene is indicated by their hair sticking up in thick-gelled clumps. But the primary problem is that Joshua's psychological manipulations takes place almost entirely off screen. This works at the beginning, when the slow moving dolly shots and teasing frames play with our anxieties. But the tension never builds past the first act, there are no confrontations with the child, and all we are left with is his silent presence -- no longer enigmatic but frustratingly inert. The end result is neither realistic, campy, or scary, just boring and ridiculous. ~ Michael Buening, All Movie Guide