Spoiler Points for Joshua (2007)

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(click poster to purchase)

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Note: If you have stumbled upon the spoiler points and would prefer a less spoiled take on the plot, please click here.

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So, here's the big spoiling:
Joshua kills his stuffed Panda, all of the classroom pets at his school, his own hamster, the family dog, Buster, and his grandmother—or, at least, these we can surmise from clues in the film. He also drives his mother crazy and most likely also manipulates her medicine, possibly putting into his sister's baby formula prompting his father to padlock off all the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen to prevent him from tampering with or poisoning the food. He does not, however, kill his father, though he does put him in grave legal danger by staging all of the necessary steps to arrive at the conclusion he's been physically abusing Joshua since Lily, the baby sister, is born. Neither does he kill Lily. Why doesn't he kill off all these other people? He obviously shows no fear, and no one is going to believe him capable. He could have easily killed his mother in the apartment above when she searches for him during a perturbing game of hide and seek. He could have made it look like it was an accident that she fell and hit her head stumbling around in the dark looking for him. Likewise, he had every opportunity to kill his father, not the least of which was what should have been Lily's final night of life, when Josh convinces his father to stay with him in his room, in his bed, like they used to when he was little. Extraordinarily protective, his father has installed an interior chain lock to his bedroom to keep Josh out and has been keeping Lily in bed with him to protect her. Huh? So, yeah, one night he falls asleep with Josh, in Josh's room, and when he wakes, of course, Josh is gone. Josh could have smothered him, and then his sister. Instead, Brad runs and finds Josh feeding non-poisoned baby formula. What? This kid has made every possible sign that he wants everyone dead, but he passes up these opportunities? And this is the chief problem with the plot. The director has chosen to sequence the film with flash slides counting up Lily's days on earth. So what? Why do this if her days are not important. It's not as if day 62 comes and that's the day Josh decides to end her life. These days have nothing to do with anything. The time may as well have been a week as a few months because the singularly most disappointing thing about the film's plot is that we never learn why Josh is the way he is. He's clearly not the son of the devil like Damien. So why then? Was he abused? What's the deal? Has his father been abusing him and blocking it from his own memory? Who knows? We'll never know because, apparently, the artistic conclusion which has Joshua's Uncle Ned playing an original composition on the piano while movers pack up their belongings. With Brad in jail on suspicion of abusing Josh based on an encounter in a public park with 30 witnesses to him throttling the kid and a wholesale catalog of drawings he's made which are textbook proof of childe abuse, his grandmother dead at the bottom of the Brooklyn Museum of Art stairs, and his mother in the funny farm, there's no one left to take care of Josh and Lily, but Ned. And Joshua says, "Doesn't this feel right? Isn't this how it always should have been." Watch your back Ned and don't ever think of mentioning you might be planning to send him away to boarding school or you're likely to endure the fate of your brother-in-law.

So, indeed, my biggest qualms with the film is that the writers did not commit to either explaining Joshua nor to him really becoming the monster. He is a monster. It's pretty clear that he killed his grandmother, though she honestly could have fallen. We know that he drove his mother crazy or, at least, pushed her over the edge. So, why not have him go all the way? It might have been the more artistically enthralling way to end the film without explanation, but the device can also be used when the writers don't know where to go next. They've built all this up, but cannot figure out how to end it or where to go with it. There is no good triumphs over evil in this film, and we are left without knowing what will happen to Joshua, why he's this way, nor whether he will eventually take the lives of those remaining in his life. Artistically, it is up to us to decide. We don’t get the perfect resolution like in The Good Son where Susan Evans must choose to drop one of two children off a cliff, her own son Henry who has been wreaking havoc on their lives for months, or her nephew Mark. Guess which one she chooses?