The Prodigy (2019)

Rating: 6.5/10
Genre: Thriller
Related Titles: Escape Room, IT, The Orphanage, Paranormal Activity, Annabelle
By Leanne Harragan 
Contains minor spoilers

The Blume family are overjoyed when their young son shows signs of extreme intelligence. This bliss soon turns into a nightmare when his behaviour becomes extremely erratic. 

While this film is marketed as a thriller, it's mainly because of it's jump scares that it gets this classification as it's not all that scary. That being said, in the cinema, with very few people in the screen and the lights down, it's so easy to get sucked into the plot of this film and I definitely found myself jumping at the sudden noises or movements! In retrospect, it's not all that scary but watching alone in the cinema, it will definitely get you.

The idea that carries this film forward is quite an interesting one to be fair. The story follows the Blume family and their extremely intelligent son Miles. Nothing overly original to start but as the plot thickens it turns out that his intelligence is not exactly what they expected. After suffering a from a blackout in which his babysitting gets severely hurt, Miles is sent to psychological experts who deduce that he has been possessed. As the film goes on, the family discover the possession came from the moment he was born - at the time of his birth, a serial killer was killed at the exact moment. The idea that these lives became intertwined through birth and death was definitely an interesting one. 

While this film is gripping and exciting in the moment, it's quite easily forgotten and wouldn't really be worth a revisit as it's fairly simple and straight forward. The wider character develop of this film is a tad weak too, while the development of Miles is solid, his mother and father are never really fleshed out and this is especially true for his father, he is used as more of a filler character to make it seem that Miles' life is perfectly normal before everything starts going downhill. 

The highlight of this film is definitely the performance given by Jackson Robert Scott playing Miles. His performance throughout the film was incredibly unnerving and often just his presence on screen was enough to make me shrink back slightly. Scott basically gave two  strong performances, often switching between the two effortlessly. His performance definitely helped keep the possibly possession at the forefront of your mind. The only other consistent character came from his mother played by Taylor Schilling, her performance was good. But for me personally, she was just too recognisable as Piper Chapman from Orange is the New Black and I found it quite hard to disassociate her with this role.  

I think that the idea behind this film is interesting the execution was a tad sloppy and too reliant on jump scares. There was some tension and it did keep me drawn to find out what was going to happen next but as soon as the lights came on at the end, the tension left and the dread that I carried throughout the film disappeared.