Director: George Ratliff
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 2.0
Sam Rockwell and wife (Vera Farmiga) welcome a baby daughter into their family, but 9-year-old Damie--, er, Joshua (Jacob Kogan) does not approve, and proceeds to torment the ever-loving crap out of them and send his already wiggy Mom to a rest home. At first I thought it was out of jealousy, but that's really a red herring: the kid's a loon, and his parents seem ill-equipped to deal with him - I don't know about anyone else, but after he pulled the stuffing out of his beloved animal's nose, gave away his earthly belongings and collapsed after a piano recital I'd be getting him examined ASAP (also, his private school teacher must be a complete ditz - kids as sullen and moody as him would have been referred to the school psychologist). You could try to read this as a critique of liberal upbringing but there really isn't that much evidence to support that interpretation and a lot of it winds up at dead ends - is the murder of his grandmother to represent rejection of Catholicism? Is the union with the 'weird Uncle' to suggest a rejection of the 'normal' heterosexual family? It's provocative, but problematic.
