The Sixth Sense reignited the "creepy kid" horror movie trope/subgenre, and though it has surprisingly endured for almost a solid decade, the trend has spawned remarkably few worthwhile films. One might be tempted to add Joshua to this scrapheap; the movie, released (dumped, actually) by Fox Searchlight approximately nowhere for a hot minute sometime in 2007, very nearly disappeared without a trace. However, critics latched onto the film as a startling psychological thriller in the vein of Rosemary's Baby without the need for supernatural hokum. Indeed, no movie I know of similarly exploits the heightened emotional tension surrounding a birth, but whereas Roman Polanski's 1969 classic is prenatal, director George Ratliff's terror is strictly post.
The film concerns a well-to-do yuppie couple (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga), who have just added a second child to the family, eight years after their first, the eponymous Joshua (Jacob Kogan). Immediately we detect, as we are meant to, something amiss with the boy: he is preternaturally serious, self-contained, playing Bartok on the family's grand piano and obsessing over ancient Egyptian burial rites. His parents, especially his father, seem both mystified and wary of him. Later, we see Joshua watching video footage of himself and his parents when he was an infant: he is screaming constantly as his mother visibly cracks up under the strain of postpartum psychosis, his father a helpless bystander amidst the unfolding emotional chaos. He suspects, as we do, that his parents don't genuinely love him, and begins to enact subtle retribution.
Joshua's first hour or so verges on brilliant, recognizing the unspoken potential terror of parenthood, namely the fact that you are essentially trapped with something you brought into the world, for good or ill. The film is initially ambiguous as to Joshua's true nature, cautiously laying out just enough string to support several theses. Then, following a harrowing game of hide-and-seek, the movie's grueling pace, essential to developing its merciless tension, unfortunately begins to unravel. The filmmakers ultimately choose to go the Damien route, turning a once-novel take on a tired premise into just another example of superior craft. Yet, to their credit, they never completely tip their hand: we never develop a clear understanding of Joshua's motives, nor a sense of his true feelings towards his baby sister, whose arrival clearly serves as the catalyst for his malfeasance (occasionally, title cards pop up to inform us of how many days old she is). Diminished, but far from crippled by its flaws, Joshua is an overlooked gem that could have been a diamond, an unsettling film that could have been truly disturbing.
