Susan Granger’s review of “Joshua” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Wall Street yuppies Brad and Abby Cairn (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) are privileged, perfect parents, living in a magnificent Upper West Side, Manhattan apartment with their nine year-old piano prodigy son, Joshua (Jacob Kogan), and their newborn daughter, Lily.
In addition to his musical genius, Joshua is an exceptional student – but definitely weird. He dismisses sports, displaying, instead, a morbid fascination with Egyptian embalming techniques. His cold, creepy passive-aggressiveness manifests itself in many sneaky ways, particularly with the arrival of a little sister and the disturbing recurrence of his mother’s deep, sleep-deprived, postpartum depression.
“You don’t have to love me,” precocious Joshua ambivalently tells his father, bonding, instead with his arty, gay, composer uncle, Ned Davidoff (Dallas Roberts), who blandly appreciates his taste for dissonant Bartok and somber Beethoven sonatas and isn’t besotted by the incessantly crying baby. But then there’s his evangelical grandmother, Hazel Cairn (Celia Weston), who, ill-advisedly, interferes.
Writer/director George Ratcliff and co-writer David Gilbert combine the spooky sociopath child – explored with more visual panache in “The Bad Seed” and “The Omen” – with the darkly disturbing psychological dynamics of family drama, amplified by the chilly elegance achieved by production designer Roshelle Berliner, Belgian cinematographer Benoit Debie and musician Nico Muhly, whose moody “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is indelible.
Yet despite the best efforts of Sam Rockwell (“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”) and Vera Farmiga (“The Departed”), their characters are underdeveloped even before they begin their inevitable, slowly-paced decline. But young Joshua Kogan is a real find – and his real-life baby sister doubled as the newborn. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Joshua” is a subtle, sinister 6. Evil, yes, but not very scary.
