The Prodigy (2019)

The Prodigy seems to posit that sometimes, parents are right to be afraid of their own children. But this is a pretty typical ‘bad seed’ type of movie like The Omen or Orphan or however many other ones. It’s so well-branded at this point it might as well be a corporate logo – Scary Kid, complete with creepy things said in a low voice, odd deadpan faces and spooky lighting! Get one at your local WalMart today!

Director: Nicholas McCarthy

Starring: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott

IMDb

We start off with a serial killer dying when the police find one of his victims, a woman whose hand he cut off for some reason. Then at the exact same moment, Taylor Schilling’s character Sarah’s baby is born! Gee, I can’t imagine they’re showing us this for any hacky reason related to reincarnation or possession of any kind. Must just be a weird coincidence! I’m sure they filmed lots of other things that didn’t make it in, like just filming totally mundane random things for the hell of it! That’s how movies work.

The kid, Miles, grows up, and to my surprise the movie actually took its time here, establishing a family dynamic and only slowly introducing the creepier elements. I guess the story is that while the boy is gifted almost from birth, he also begins exhibiting some weird tendencies like when he begins speaking Hungarian in his sleep and it turns out to be some stuff like “you whore, I’ll cut out your eyes,” and you know, as far as an eight-year-old’s conversational skills, this isn’t that bad. Most eight-year-olds are way less interesting to talk to.

I think the craziest time to me is when he beats up a little kid with a wrench at school, and somehow is not kicked out after that – you never see the other kid again, but Miles is still there. But then again, what’s a little aggravated battery when you’re a kid? It’s just part of growing up.

So Sarah just goes to this weird doctor who tells her that reincarnation is real and her son is probably fighting off an evil spirit in his brain that could take him over completely! Imagine going to what you thought was a legit doctor and hearing that. He goes into insane detail about this. It’s like if you went to a totally normal doctor’s office with a bad cough and the guy turned to you and said unironically “you’re turning into a werewolf.”

But because this is some real brainless idiotic shit, the guy is totally right! He was on the money! He should probably try gambling because he’d be good at it most likely.

I think one of my favorite parts is when it’s revealed that the kid has rigged a baby monitor to spy on what his parents are saying, attaching it secretly to a picture downstairs. Are we sure this is a serious movie? Seems more like some kind of wacky sitcom. What will this boy genius do next? Maybe rig a school PA to play some hip trendy music so all the cool kids will like him?

Sarah's husband Edward flies off the handle randomly, losing his temper as if this were a fundamental aspect of his character and he were a fully three-dimensional character. But really it just seems random, and like a way to get him out of the movie for a while. He also gets into a car crash as well later – man, the script really tossed this guy aside like an old girlfriend it got tired of. The movie knew what to do with him about as much as a kid staying at his weird bachelor uncle’s house for a weekend.

Oh, and when she takes him to see that doctor dude, Miles blackmails the doctor into telling Sarah there’s no possession after all – he set up this whole plan to frame the doctor by taking his drugs, taking pubic hair off the toilet to put in his mouth (!!) to simulate the doctor putting his dick in his mouth, it’s fucking crazy. The doctor, though, he should probably quit – would you want anyone that easily outsmarted to be in charge of your mind? He’d probably get distracted and turn you into a vegetable.

I guess they figure out that to get the killer out of Miles, they have to complete the task he was there to do, which is murdering the killer’s final victim who escaped years ago. Sarah actually buys a gun and it looks like she’s gonna do it herself, which is completely batshit, like really just an out-there plot.

But if you’re afraid the movie might actually try something different and daring, nope! She wimps out and instead Miles, possessed by the killer, brutally murders the woman. Hooray for exactly the most predictable thing you could possibly do! But at least we got to see something completely, pointlessly cruel on top of that! That makes it all OK. Or maybe it makes it a total piece of shit. I can never tell.

Then Sarah chases Miles out into a field and tries to shoot him. Miles says he’s totally evil now and is only the killer, with Sarah’s actual son now completely gone. But of course, some random farmer guy shows up exactly at the right time, conveniently not hearing anything the kid said, and shoots Sarah before she can kill Miles. Of course! It’s not a lazy plot twist at all! Sometimes people just materialize out of nowhere right when the villain needs them to!

Then of course you get the lame-ass ending where Miles is at some new foster family’s place and he sees the killer in the mirror, signifying that HE IS ACTUALLY THE KILLER. Oh, wait, we already knew that. What a great ending, just reiterating what we already knew from the first act of the movie like it's a surprise!

Fuck The Prodigy, man. This is some seriously lame, dated, half-assed nonsense. Every decision made is cliché and the movie is afraid to take risks. The characters exist only as arbitrary hollow chess pieces to move around. The plot shies away from anything exciting and there’s no point to any of it. What was the message here? Serial killers are bad? Yeah, real Einstein-level shit, guys. At least Taylor Schilling is great – hope she gets a better movie next time.

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