Powder (1995)

Powder arrives from 1995, a year in which a pale young man with a record IQ and an electromagnetic aura could still be sold as a Christ figure without anyone in the room flinching. Victor Salva's film concerns Jeremy Reed, an albino teenager raised in a basement, whose gifts include telepathy, healing, and the ability to make light fixtures misbehave whenever his feelings get the better of him. The film regards him with the reverence normally reserved for stained glass. It is, by any measure, a solemn piece of work.

The social consciousness on display is thin and mostly incidental. Jeremy's albinism functions as a supernatural affliction instead of a lived identity, and the camera treats his body as a spectacle to be pitied. A brief homophobic taunt from a classmate is deployed as a humiliation device, not as anything resembling affirming content. Mary Steenburgen's psychologist is competent and professional, yet she exists to shepherd the male protagonist toward his transcendence. Race goes unmentioned entirely. There is a dying doe, and a family farm lost to bank probate, and these gestures toward animal empathy and institutional indifference amount to little more than set dressing.

Where the film does exert pressure is in its sermonizing. The lightning-borne messiah heals the sick, revives the dead, and delivers monologues about how every person is secretly connected to everything that exists. Critics at the time found it self-important, and they were correct. The whole enterprise strains for uplift with the grim determination of a man assembling furniture without instructions. It is earnest, humorless, and convinced of its own profundity, which makes it its own kind of period piece.