We get behind her as she breathes heavier and heavier in enveloping panic, something the mostly quiet film does here cleverly instead of piling it on with screeching horror sounds and music. So this makes mummy Sarah the best thing here as Schilling anchors this flick sympathetically as the MILF - that’s Mother In Loony Freefall - going unhinged as she's both baffled and terrified by the increasingly sinister Mini Spooky Me in her predictably big house with predictably deep hallways dipped in predictably bad lighting. Seriously, don't folks in horror movies ever watch horror movies?
By the way, the kid has two differently coloured eyes just like the serial killer, so that mummy knows for sure that little Sonny is right in there with big Baddie.īut frankly, we really do get a lot of deadly under-agers in horror deals like this -creepy kids whom every grown-up underestimates and always never ever imagine are capable of pure evil despite multiple screenings of The Omen. Now, the child actor here, Scott - channelling his junior Jack Nicholson from The Shining - creeps me out with his rehearsed look of cold-eyed badness because I always get nightmares about children when I think about going spine-chillingly broke raising them. He's what we call a smarty pants,” the doctor tells the initially wow-ed mother, Sarah, when her “prodigy” son shows the genius potential that would top an elite SAP school in Singapore. While we here in the funky, mysterious East have already been there, done that and seen that. In most of the world, reincarnation is an accepted part of life,” a past-life expert here (Colm Feore) explains to impress the movie's startled Western viewers. Or maybe just this idea of reincarnation is supposed to be inherently scary. Which means that The Prodigy, while being somewhat unnerving with jump scares here and there in a slowly-cooking ang moh way, will not spook us - hardened believers of past-life karma drama - into keeping the lights in our HDB flats turned on. You know also that if this was, say, a Thai chiller, we'd be terrified right out of our 10 previous lives because our own fright-meisters in our Asian backyard are very good at staging reincarnation scare fare. You know this is a tale about reincarnation because the mum's (Taylor Schilling) screams at childbirth are juxtaposed with the villain screaming while being shot to hell in a sort of sickly-parallel film technique by horror-buff director Nicholas McCarthy ( The Pact, At The Devil's Door). Resulting in two souls fighting to inhabit the same body the way two fat guys jostle to go through the same narrow door.
Yep, we're talking about the maniac being born again in the kid here. Because, in a most extreme case of truly lousy timing, Miles is born in Pennsylvania right after a very vile and violent Hungarian-speaking serial killer, Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux), is killed by cops in neighbouring Ohio when his final female victim manages to escape. Man, it's safer to raise a pet dog (Spoiler alert: the poor dog here doesn't fare very well, too).Īnd get this: the boy somehow speaks obscure Hungarian without even being taught how. You're going to die,” he tells his dad menacingly. Useful tip - never play anything while barefoot with anybody's kid ever. In an early scene of his wickedness, he deliberately hurts the babysitter in a very painful game of hide-and-seek. One look at him and I guarantee you'd never want to have children.Įight-year-old Miles Blume (Jackson Robert Scott) gives his parents the evil eye, cusses with his foul mouth, creeps up on his spooked mum and lurks in the shadows with really sharp tools. Starring Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Colm Feoreīoy, this severely twisted kid in The Prodigy sure isn't going to help our falling birth rate.