The Prodigy, the newest horror film by Orion Pictures, stars the very talented Taylor Schilling (who has hung up her Orange is the New Black jumpsuit), playing a suburban mom that has just given birth to her first child, Miles.
The movie opens with girl running out of an old house in the woods, stopping a passing car and slowly revealing that … she only has one hand. Spooky (I guess). When the cops show up to the house she escaped from and shoot the guy that had her locked up, Miles (“The Prodigy”) is born at the same time as the man dies. Is this the Child’s Play reboot?
Unfortunately from here, everything gets even more generic.
Miles is a creepy kid that looks exactly like every single creepy kid in every single American horror movie, now wrapped in a basic by-the-numbers horror flick. But no matter how generic, the biggest standout in the movie is definitely this titular role, as played by Jackson Robert Scott (whose most recent horror role was Georgie from the It film adaptation)
But, as you can expect, weird things begin to happen around young Miles, who starts displaying creepy behavior, including hitting a kid in school with a pipe wrench, starts speaking weird things in his sleep, His mother quickly takes him to see a doctor to get another opinion on his behavior (including an actually pretty great jump scare).
But then we learn he was speaking Hungarian in his sleep because, you guessed it, the murderer from the cold open was Hungarian.
From there, the rest of the movie spirals into mediocrity with some edgy-seeming dialogue that just made most people in the theater laugh. The entire movie just feels disjointed, jumping from one scene to the next (and with the doctors leaping to insane conclusions on the first visit). And, halfway through the movie, it loses steam by the time supporting characters start being picked off. I had a hard time caring about any of them, which was disappointing.
If you have seen any creepy white kid horror movie with that same generic haircut you have probably seen every single scene that happens in The Prodigy (with an Hungarian edge). And, with the amount of good straight-to-streaming horror movies being released, I am, for the life of me, trying to figure why this one got the big screen treatment as opposed to the others.
Put The Prodigy back in the womb.
