Steer clear of the 2006 remake though, an unimaginative Xerox of the original with nothing to recommend it.
Baylock being the highlight), young Harvey Spencer Stephens does a fine job, his pageboy haircut only briefly concealing the child’s demonic nature. Amid a distinguished cast ( Billie Whitelaw as demented nanny Mrs. The exact nature of Damien’s powers are never quite spelled out, beyond an obvious malevolence, but that actually helps the film’s metaphorical power to a degree: the film becomes a sort of prototypical “ We Need To Talk About Kevin,” examining the greatest fears of a parent, that their beloved child could turn out to be, well, evil. Ambassador to the U.K., beginning to suspect that something is wrong with his son, Damien, and that his child may have actually been swapped at birth with the Antichrist, the child of Satan. The film sees Robert Thorn ( Gregory Peck, bringing an invaluable degree of dignity to proceedings), the U.S. The convolutions of its plot and premise aside, the intelligent humanism of the approach is marked out by the characterization of Cid as neither good nor evil yet, just a huge mass of potential to become either.Ī sort of “ Citizen Kane” of evil children movies, leading directly to a whole sub-genre of horror films including the likes of “ Joshua” and “ Orphan,” Richard Donner’s “The Omen” is a tremendously entertaining piece of pulp that walks the line neatly between being genuinely unnerving and deeply silly. It’s then that hitman Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt), having failed to kill his future self ( Bruce Willis) as ordered, meets little Cid ( Pierce Gagnon), whose extraordinary telekinetic abilities mark him out as the fabled Rainmaker of the future - a malevolent all-powerful entity that Old Joe has vowed to eradicate. But only slightly: set in a world where one of the chief uses for black-market time travel is for gangsters to send back victims into the past for execution so no bodies exist to incriminate them, “Looper” really finds its feet (and its heart) in its second, more philosophical half. But Rian Johnson‘s time-travel thriller is more twistily plotted than Nichols’ somber, lower-key drama, and is slightly less involved in ineffable existential and metaphysical questions.
Perhaps the closest recent analog to “Midnight Special,” “Looper” not only boasts a similar melding of independent and genre film sensibilities, but it also places at its center a somewhat ambivalent, super-powered child, whose parents will do anything to protect him. Aside from keeping it to younger, prepubescent kids (so no “ Carrie“) and excluding comic-book or young adult-based movies in which the child may develop his/her superpowers at a young age (like “ Superman,” or “ Harry Potter,” for example), our only guideline is that the films should be at least watchable (a surprising number are not) and should in some way hinge on the contradiction that is a child with distinctly un-childlike abilities and skills. READ MORE: The 30 Best Horror Films of the 1990sĪnticipating the release of “Midnight Special,” we’ve taken a moment to highlight 15 other examples of supernaturally powered children from the better films on the subject. 'Adventure Time' Is Slowly Going Off the Air, And Everyone's Moving OnĪwards Perennials Jessica Chastain and Viola Davis Are Back in the Oscar Race IndieWire's Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn Picks the Best Movies of 2020 - Year in Review This puts his parents and their collaborators in the terrifying position of having to protect something they do not understand: they cannot even know if he is a force for good or evil, only that he is a force, he is in danger and he is their son. This theme crops up again in this week’s “ Midnight Special” from director Jeff Nichols ( our review here), in which the boy in question, the son of Kirsten Dunst and Michael Shannon‘s characters, has immense resources of potentially destructive, potentially Messianic powers that he is barely able to control. It’s a concept that Hollywood has exploited time and again, sometimes for comic but more often for dramatic or horrific purposes. So the idea of the child endowed with unnatural powers that render him or her less than innocent, good, or obedient is fundamentally unsettling. We have such deeply-set assumptions about children and childhood - innocence, powerlessness, fundamental “goodness” - that any challenge to those notions is often met with incredulity or defensiveness.
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