Nicolas Cage’s Jesus Horror Movie ‘The Carpenter's Son’ Gets Harsh Reviews

Nicolas Cage’s Jesus-inspired horror movie The Carpenter’s Son probably won’t make it into rotation for Christmas movie marathons in the future.

The 2025 blockbuster, which was written and directed by filmmaker Lotfy Nathan, loosely adapts lesser-known and disputed stories of Jesus Christ’s teenage years into a brutal and bloody tale about the religious figure (A Quiet Place Part II and The Night Manager’s Noah Jupe) and his family on the run from demonic forces.

In The Carpenter’s Son, Jesus is desperate for answers over whether the man who raised him (Cage) is his true father. His confusion could lead him into falling prey to a sinister entity known as The Stranger (The Queen’s Gambit star Isla Johnston). Pop star FKA Twigs also has a leading role as “The Mother,” another mysterious figure who unquestionably holds crucial answers over Jesus Christ’s origin.

Despite the film’s impressive cast and spooky story, The Carpenter’s Son has been mostly savaged by critics, who derided it as Jesus Christ’s “first and most boring temptation” and insisted seeing it was “like watching paint dry for an hour and a half.” As of November 2025, The Carpenter’s Son has an overwhelmingly negative 35 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Keep scrolling for more on the negative reviews and The Carpenter’s Son’s disputed subject matter.

What Is ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ About?

An official synopsis for The Carpenter’s Son cryptically hints: “A remote village in Roman-era Egypt explodes into spiritual warfare when a carpenter, his wife and their child are targeted by supernatural forces.”

The script was written and directed by Lotfy Nathan, who gained international recognition for following a group of urban dirt bikers in Baltimore, Maryland, in the 2013 documentary 12 O’Clock Boys.

The Carpenter’s Son is partially inspired by The Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

What Is ‘The Infancy Gospel of Thomas’?

The Carpenter’s Son is a mostly original story that takes some inspiration from The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a disputed addition to the New Testament that supposedly fills in gaps from Jesus’s adolescence. Religious scholars have attacked The Infancy Gospel of Thomas as heretical for the way it deviates from traditional biblical dogma.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas takes place during Jesus Christ’s childhood, between ages 5 and 12, as the future Messiah of Christianity learns to use his superhuman powers for good. One story involves a mishap where Jesus accidentally turns his neighbor blind after the man complained to his parents, Mary and Joseph, while another passage references the young Messiah transforming clay pigeons into living birds.

“[The Infancy Gospel of Thomas] is written like a laundry list of events. It doesn’t really have an arc, so to speak,” Nathan told the Associated Press. “I had a historian pull a lot of research for me before I wrote the first draft.”

The Carpenter’s Son introduces an original character named The Stranger (Isla Johnston), who possesses strange and disturbing powers of her own. The Carpenter’s Son official trailer hints that The Stranger is a demonic entity — or perhaps Satan herself — on a mission to use Jesus’ powers for her own evil means.

Has ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ Caused Controversy With Religious Groups?

Yes. The Carpenter’s Son has proved to be very controversial for turning the life of Jesus Christ into a gruesome horror movie and for adapting the disputed Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

The American Family Association (AMA) created a petition demanding producers Magnolia Pictures “cancel this dark and blasphemous film” in September 2025. The organization warned its readers not to be “misled by the title” of The Carpenter’s Son.

“This is not a Christian film,” the group complained. “The Carpenter’s Son is not a biblically accurate portrayal of Christ’s childhood. Inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the movie focuses on the childhood of Jesus from a horror perspective.”

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Their statement went on, “Details of the plot are vague, but the unsettling trailer describes Jesus’ life as a horror-thriller with a possessed and supernatural force. This is not a movie Christians want to see.”

The AMA argued that it was “extremely disrespectful to Christians” to purposefully create a movie that was “blasphemous,” before warning that The Carpenter’s Son could be “dangerous and confusing to children.”

Other religious groups objected to the movie potentially portraying Jesus as an “inherently evil or malevolent force,” and there were even protests planned outside of theaters screening The Carpenter’s Son.

What Are Critics Saying About ‘The Carpenter’s Son’?

Critics were not much kinder to The Carpenter’s Son than religious groups — though they had different complaints. One of the overriding criticisms of The Carpenter’s Son was that there weren’t many true scares.

TheWrap credited The Carpenter’s Son with having “interesting ideas,” though its reviewer suggested the movie couldn’t live up to its intriguing premise.

“[The ideas] just don’t seem interesting because the perspective is cockeyed, which nullifies the film’s ability to trouble our hearts,” the outlet noted.

The AV Club complained: “It takes dedication to make a dull movie where Nicolas Cage plays Joseph and Jesus gets into a fistfight with Satan, but The Carpenter’s Son sets to its task with devotion, if little else.”

Slant dinged The Carpenter’s Son for its “simplistic” retelling of Jesus Christ’s origin story and “strained seriousness,” while also finding fault with Cage’s “unusually muted” performance.

“For all its visual stylishness, The Carpenter’s Son feels like such an essentially misconceived project that it seems destined for future cult status, with audiences at midnight screenings shouting out the more outrageous lines in unison with the actors,” The Hollywood Reporter insisted in its review.

The Carpenter’s Son only has a 35 percent critical score via Rotten Tomatoes as of November 2025, though not all critics disliked it. (No audience score has been determined at the time of this writing.)

Deadline admitted that The Carpenter’s Son “might not fully please devotees” of religion or horror movies while still giving the film credit for being “different.”

“Thanks to its great performances, the historical drama takes on deeply psychological hues, making for a surprisingly fun take on the familiar, despite its occasionally conservative imagery,” IGN wrote.

What Has Nicolas Cage Said About “The Carpenter’s Son’?

Cage acknowledged controversy over the release of The Carpenter’s Son by referencing the backlash faced by director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese’s 1988 movie drew widespread protests from religious groups for its depiction of Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, struggling to overcome various forms of temptation.

“I was in line to get my tickets and I remember there were the picketers and they were angry. And I said, ‘Well have you seen the movie?’ And they said no,” Cage told the Associated Press. “Don’t you think you should see it before you make a statement about it or judge it?”

He added, “Nobody wanted to offend anybody in the making of this movie. If anyone does go to this movie, they would see that everyone treated it with love and not with any approach of mockery or contempt. It was all about love.”

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Cage explained that The Carpenter’s Son specifically resonated with him as someone who is fascinated by family dramas.

“Family dramas, it’s no secret, is one of my favorite subject matters or genres. I couldn’t think of a more compelling family dynamic than the Nativity,” Cage said in November 2025. “As I read it and thought about it, I never thought of it as a horror film per se. I saw it as a family drama about an existential crisis.”

The Carpenter’s Son opens on Friday, November 14.