The Prodigy (2019)

The Prodigy arrives in 2019 as a sturdy specimen of the bad seed picture, a genre with impeccable pre-2015 credentials and no evident interest in the cultural conversations of its own moment. Nicholas McCarthy directs with patience, Taylor Schilling suffers with conviction, and a child named Miles says unsettling things in Hungarian. There is a metronome. There are maggots. A dog does not survive. The film knows what it is and does not reach beyond its station, which in the current climate registers as a small and unexpected courtesy.

We look, as always, for the marks of social consciousness and find them faint. Sarah Blume drives the investigation, administers the sleeping pills, and travels to a farmhouse with a gun in her purse, so a maternal agency is at work, though the genre has handed mothers a flashlight since the Reagan administration and we should not mistake tradition for a thesis. The supporting cast includes a few minority performers in professional roles, a doctor here, a colleague there, and the film regards them with the indifference of a story that has other business. The boy is dragged to a psychiatrist and then to a reincarnation specialist, and every diagnosis is routed toward the supernatural, leaving no room for a reading about a struggling child who needs accommodation. The regression sessions supply exposition and a few stern words about the soul, never a moral.

For a horror picture of the late 2010s this is a remarkably unbothered piece of work, content to frighten without commentary. No one eats the rich. Nothing mourns the planet. The farmhouse and the suburb and the stretch of rural Ohio carry no whisper of class grievance. Whether this amounts to artistic purity or a simple absence of ambition is a question the film declines to answer, and after ninety minutes of a boy carving a name into furniture, so do we.