This karmic transference also lacks any particular justification besides the obvious expediency of putting a child in peril. Although Buhler introduces the malevolent presence threatening Miles in the opening scenes, there’s never any clear reason why the boy becomes its victim, other than being born at an unlucky time. Originally titled Descendant, the script by horror specialist Jeff Buhler seems like it was tossed off between assignments penning higher-profile projects like the upcoming Pet Sematary remake and another adaptation of The Grudge.
The results are so shocking that the psychologist comes to believe that Miles and his parents may be in mortal danger from the being seeking to absorb the child’s personality. Not that his parents actually believe that could be possible, but as Miles becomes increasingly distressed, Sarah agrees to let Jacobson perform hypnosis on him in order to regress his memories. When he begins exhibiting more aberrant behavior, Sarah takes him to psychologist Arthur Jacobson (Colm Feore), who provides a startling diagnosis: Miles’ mind may be in the grip of a reincarnated entity seeking to take control of his body. That isn’t a huge issue for his parents, who are Miles’ most frequent companions, but his antisocial attitude concerns them.
Their only child Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), born with an unusually high IQ that sets him apart from most other children, attends third grade at a private school for gifted kids, where he has difficulty making friends, preferring to focus on art projects instead. The film’s cardinal sin isn’t so much that it’s unoriginal as that it’s so uninvolving, it almost assures attention deficit will set in early, as audiences begin to wonder about the downside of parenting for well-off couple Sarah ( Taylor Schilling) and John (Peter Mooney). Struggling throughout with issues of structure and pacing, Nicholas McCarthy’s horror feature threatens to debase standards for the genre to levels that even undiscriminating thrill-seekers seem likely to reject. Karma is a killer in The Prodigy, a woefully inadequate interpretation of the tenets of reincarnation and their impact on one innocent family.
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