Director: Joseph Ruben | Genre: Thriller / Drama | Runtime: 87 min.
After Mark (Elijah Wood), a young boy, loses his mother to cancer, he visits his aunt and uncle due to his father; Jack (David Morse) leaving for a business trip in Tokyo. Mark soon makes friends with his cousin Henry (Macaulay Culkin), who is of similar age but possesses a dark and violent side, leading to devastating consequences.
If "oh cool, the kid from Home Alone is in this movie, it's gonna be fun for all the family" is what you're thinking - think again. Taking on a much more serious role, Culkin portrays a sociopath of sorts who feels absolutely no guilt for carrying out his dreadful actions, and it's a great example of how child actors can provide some of the most impressive performances.
The earlier parts of the movie seem innocent enough, it's when Henry starts his questionable antics that you get a real insight of what he's really like, for example a particular scene has him throwing a dummy off a bridge into oncoming traffic, effectively causing numerous car crashes. Clearly disturbed by this, Mark tries to expose Henry's true nature throughout to the adults, but generally finds no luck - this is constant throughout the movie.
There's a real sense of good versus evil here, proving that evil can form in the most unlikely places - who's going to think a kid sporting a butter wouldn't melt face could do such terrible things? It's certainly an interesting road to explore as we generally don't like to think humans could be this cruel, especially children. Generally, The Good Son is a daring movie that plays upon some very dark themes and it goes all out to showcase them, which is both admirable and challenging to watch for some.
7/10
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