The setting and characters lack detail as well. In addition to leaving no mystery about what’s “wrong with Miles,” it has no subplots and very few plot twists and feels episodic and perfunctory, as if it’s merely covering the (minimum of) events necessary to the plot.
Its premise and basic plot provided a solid foundation, but what Buhler built upon it is spare and shoddy.
THE PRODIGY MOVIE PLOT SERIAL
(Incidentally, because The Prodigy is rated PG-13, the serial killer’s private parts are kept private from shot to shot with various “strategic coverings,” the final and funniest one being a rifle barrel.) And tipping its hand at the start is just one of many problems with Jeff Buhler’s script. Revealing that the consciousness of a serial killer, just after his death, invaded Miles just before his birth isn’t a spoiler for those who haven’t yet seen the movie-it’s virtually spelled out for the audience in the parallel-edited opening scenes, with the heterochromatic eyes and blood spatter pattern on the chest of the naked, gunned-down serial killer matching those of the naked, newborn Miles. And The Prodigy features swipes from these classic evil child movies but also an original twist on the trope: the source of the evil isn’t anethopathic genes, demonic possession, or being sired by Satan but a serial killer’s consciousness that transmigrated from his just-killed body to Miles’s about-to-be-born one.
The Omen (1976) features a saturnine five-year-old boy who’s the Antichrist born into a family of wealth and power. The Exorcist (1973) features a sweet twelve-year-old girl possessed by an ancient Mesopotamian demon. The original evil child movie, The Bad Seed (1956), features a self-contained eight-year-old girl who inherited psychopathy from her serial killer grandmother. An adorable little boy with heterochromatic eyes “like David Bowie,” he begins “using some words” by age six months and attending a special preschool at age two because his “intelligence is off the charts.” But while his “brain is extremely well-developed in certain regions there are other areas that appear to be delayed.” So Miles is asocial … and at age eight becomes aggressively antisocial. When he’s born to parents who “tried so long to have” him, his mother declares, “He’s perfect,” and he certainly seems to be. Furthermore, parents- good parents, anyway-want the best and fear the worst for their children, so a child afflicted by something seriously wrong or who goes seriously wrong is their worst nightmare.Īnd the tagline for The Prodigy (2019) is “There’s something wrong with Miles.” But at first it seems there’s “nothing wrong” with him-quite the opposite, in fact. After all, children are nonthreatening to and naturally elicit tender and protective feelings from adults, so evil ones disturb us deeply and catch us off-guard. So it shouldn’t surprise us that one of its most popular tropes is that of the “evil child,” the preadolescent who’s either innately evil or possessed by an evil entity. Horror fiction- good horror fiction, anyway-plays upon our deepest fears, threatens our sense of existential normalcy, and subverts our standards of human decency. REBORN TO KILL: A REVIEW OF THE PRODIGY (2019) SANS SPOILERS Evil child, horror, Jackson Robert Scott, Jim Wallace, reincarnation, Serial Killer, Taylor Schilling, The Bad Seed, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Prodigy, transmigrationĬAST: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Peter Mooney, Colm Feore, Paula Boudreau, Brittany Allen, Paul Fauteux
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