Son (2021)

Befitting its title, this movie feels like the son of The Exorcist and Rosemary – and in that sense it is proof that talent does skip a generation. It's as if screenwriter/director Ivan Kavanagh thought that revisiting Rosemary's baby was a good idea, even though someone else had already gone back to that particular well, and the result left a lot to be desired (I’m referring of course to Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby).

Laura (Andi Matichak) is the young single mother of David (Luke David Blumm). One night, Laura stumbles upon a group of refugees from the Bramford Building in David's room. She runs off to a neighbor's house and calls the police. As it often happens in these cases, the police find not a shred of evidence of a home invasion, and one of the detectives (Cranston Johnson) obviously thinks Laura is one card short of a full deck.

In contrast, the other detective, Paul (Emile Hirsch), is understanding, patient, and attentive – in short, he is so obliging that we immediately know he’s going to doublecross Laura sooner or later; it's just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Shortly after, David begins to experience symptoms of a disease that a battery of tests is unable to identify, but which we could call Regan MacNeil Syndrome. It turns out that Laura's father was the leader of a satanic cult/pedophile ring (a little too late to exploit the so-called satanic panic, ain’t it?). David is believed by all in the know to be the product of Laura being raped by her father, just as Rosemary was under the impression of having had sex with Guy, when in reality she had inadvertently become the devil's concubine (between the ages of 10 and 18, Laura, then known as Anna, lived a life of sexual subservience, and to give the devil his due, the newspaper clippings the characters look up are a very nice touch. Too bad the photo of the alleged victim depicts an incongruously smiling Anna/Laura).

In keeping with the Rosemary pattern, David is not the fruit of an incestuous relationship, but of Laura's union with the prince of darkness. Now, as far as demon seeds go, David is rather underwhelming. To begin with, he has to eat human flesh; otherwise he becomes violently, and presumably fatally, ill. That is, the son of El Diablo is as dependable as a junky going through withdrawal. Sure, he's capable of subduing prey several times his size, but this is disappointingly pedestrian, especially when compared to Damien Thorn, who never had to get his hands dirty.

The biggest problem here is that, while the best thing in the whole movie, Blumm's performance is not right for the character. David is (except when hunger overcomes him) more Regan than Damien (which doesn't stop Kavanagh from blatantly ripping off The Omen’s ending), and as such, we want him to find salvation, not see him embracing, so to speak, the dark side of the force.