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Paranoia Is In The Eye of The Beholder
By bukkhead | July 13, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘JOSHUA’
Written by David Gilbert and George Ratliff
Directed by George Ratliff
Rated R
105 mins.
The sound of a baby crying is one of the most disturbing sounds anyone can experience. It goes right to the core of your being, and while it’s not terrifying, or particularly scary, it nevertheless sets you on edge and doesn’t let go. George Ratliff uses the sound of a baby crying to perfect execution in his first feature-length film Joshua, and the rest of the movie has the same quality: you are on edge throughout, never entirely sure why, but absolutely absorbed and disturbed.
Joshua is the nine year old son of Brad and Abbey, and big brother to newborn Lily. Everything is ideal at first: Lily is a calm, beautiful baby, that everyone is in love with; and Joshua is the perfect little boy, quiet, smart, well mannered, and talented at the piano, playing Bartok. But then things start to unravel; Lily starts to cry, and cry, and cry, and the emotional stress drives a wedge between Brad and Abbey. As their life falls apart, the unraveling is punctuated by accidents and mishaps; all the while, Joshua is in the background, watching quietly, his face revealing absolutely no emotion.
Creepy doesn’t even begin to describe this movie, though it’s the predominate emotion. Ratliff balances everything perfectly, revealing nothing without hanging doubt and misdirection on it. Is Joshua responsible? Is Abbey going crazy? Is Brad contributing it all? What’s really wrong with Lily? This is defiantly not a movie about a bad seed or some kind of Sixth Sense secret. The brilliance of Ratliff’s direction lies in how we are treated to the very agony of uncertainty that Brad and Abbey are facing.
And Ratliff leaves no detail unrealized. Day time scenes are bright and over exposed, night time scenes are dim, thick with shadows, and possess a grainy quality contributing to the unease. Scenes are shot from a variety of angles, making you sometimes a voyeur in the family’s upper-west-side apartment, sometimes an uncomfortable participant. Other images abound: Abbey’s Rosemary’s Baby haircut, the use of ancient Egyptian mythology not just as a prop but as a theme; even details like the wall-hanging tapestry of an old fashioned straight-razor add to the atmosphere of creepiness, disquiet, and unease. The background music is straight out of a moody horror film, but there are no horror-film images. No gotcha moments, no weapon-wielding maniacs, no gore. Everything terrifying happens off screen or out-of-scene.
Sam Rockwell is excellent as Brad, though we expect no less. He knows better than to steal scenes or over-interpret his role. Even though he has more lines and screen time than any other character, this is a movie about what you didn’t see, and Rockwell expertly reacts to the uncertainty, developing from confidant and happy to over confidant, and then paranoid, and then utterly defeated. And Jacob Kogan as Joshua delivers each line with such a lack of sincerity, it just adds to the creepiness of the film; is it Kogan, or Joshua, who is delivering “scripted” lines?
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