The moral of The Prodigy is as classic as horror movies go - it would be this: Creepy
kids sure are creepy!
But lurking under the surface of this tale of alarming and unsettling offspring is a
deeper story of a mother's love and a child's role in the world.
So maybe you stuck with The Prodigy to its sadistic end, or maybe you were too shocked
by the sight of all that stomach blood to follow the final twists.
Well, get ready, because we've got some major spoilers ahead.
Let's dig back through the ending of The Prodigy to figure out what it all really meant.
Even though the movie takes awhile to build up to the full reveal, the main premise of
The Prodigy is laid out right in the beginning.
A series of spliced scenes reveal a police task force raiding the compound of a mysterious
serial killer at the exact same time a woman named Sarah, played by Taylor Schilling, gives
birth to a baby boy in a hospital.
As soon as the man is shot to death, the infant pops out.
"Sedate her."
This scene introduces audiences to the building blocks that this movie is constructed on.
But more than that, it also lubricates the audience's minds to the bizarre concepts of
reincarnation and soul transfer that come into play towards the movie's end.
By giving away the big reveal before the opening credits even finish, The Prodigy has plenty
of room to play with those ideas without putting the brakes on the story to explain how all
this happened.
We already know: There's a serial killer's soul living in Miles.
He's gonna do bad things.
Y'know, just like Chucky, but with a real boy instead!
"I hate kids."
The Prodigy leans heavily on this important idea of reincarnation — when you die, you
come back to life in another body.
But in this movie world, the process is sort of like a ghost haunting an old house.
That mean ol' spirit is only sticking around because it left behind some unfinished business.
"What in the hell is going on out here?
Get back in your graves."
But The Prodigy's plot points draw from more than mystical gurus and religious beliefs.
The DVD that reincarnation maestro Arthur Jacobson gives to Sarah in the film also comes
from a real news investigation into a boy who claimed to be a reincarnated World War
II pilot.
"I can beat the Japanese easy as pie."
Clearly, the idea was to present all these far-fetched themes as offshoots the real world,
anchoring Miles' predicament — and his eventual outcome — within the realm of real-life
possibility.
Eh, anyway...
So let's talk about Miles, the titular prodigy and solid proof that kids should never do
their own Halloween makeup.
This is a boy with two souls inside him, both acting on his psyche at any given time.
It turns out that he's not actually a prodigy after all.
All those special smarts are courtesy of Edward Scarka, the crazy man who died at the beginning
of the movie.
The movie plays with this duality constantly.
From the heterochromia that gives Miles two different colored eyes, to scenes with Miles'
face halfway obscured by shadow, we're given no opportunity to forget that there's a killer
in there.
The most iconic moment comes when Miles is eight years old and wipes off one half of
his skeleton Halloween makeup.
Staring into the mirror, he sees half of a normal boy's face and half of a twisted skeleton's...with
an unhealthy interest in ladies' hands.
It's around this time that Scarka's mind starts entirely consuming the boy, leading him to
commit some pretty vicious acts.
"Miles, what did you do?"
As The Prodigy enters its final act, it does eventually stick a concrete direction..
Once Sarah accepts the fact that Miles is possessed by another dude's soul, her working
theory is that Scarka has some unfinished business that led him to stick around the
land of the living after his own death.
And once she finds Miles-Scarka's stash of reading material in Miles' bedroom, she knows
what that business is: Scarka needs to kill Margaret St. James, played by Brittany Allen.
You may remember her as the young woman who got away from him and led the police to his
house in the opening scenes of the film.
Sarah decides to help Scarka finish the job, reasoning that doing so will free his soul
and cause him to leave Miles once and for all.
So Sarah buys a gun and takes her possessed son on a road trip to the far-away land of
Ohio, intent on confronting St. James at her house.
With this decision, The Prodigy veers out of Bad Seed territory and takes us down a
new path.
This isn't a family trying to survive their evil progeny; this is a mother who will stop
at nothing to protect her son, even if it means shooting an innocent woman.
Second thoughts
The internal conflict Sarah faces as she contemplates shooting Margaret St. James is compounded
by a shocking revelation — Margaret herself also has children.
By shooting her, Sarah would only save her own son at the expense of another mother.
Like Miles' Halloween paint, the movie introduces this mirrored circumstance with the help of
a literal mirror.
Sarah loads her gun in Margaret's bathroom, only to come face to face with her reflection.
She realizes that, in a way, she'll be destroying the life of someone very much like herself
in an effort to prevent the destruction of her own.
In the end, Sarah can't do it.
She drops the gun on the kitchen table and accepts defeat.
That is, until Miles walks into the kitchen with a big knife and plunges it into Margaret
St. James, finishing the job that Scarka started years earlier in the woods of Ohio.
Miles isn't a kid you want in the back seat of your car, and Sarah knows this.
Earlier in the movie, the boy stabbed his dad with a big pair of garden scissors.
That's the kind of thing that would totally ruin Sarah's plan, so before she starts the
long drive to see Margaret St. James, she gives Miles a motion sickness pill that'll
put him to sleep and thwart any unexpected stabbings.
"It's big relief for your little traveler.
Dramamine for kids!"
It appears to work.
When they finally arrive at St. James' house, Miles is still fast asleep, giving Sarah time
to take care of the business without his interference.
Unfortunately, she forgot the foreshadowing provided by Arthur Jacobson earlier in the
film: Scarka is really, really good at pretending to be asleep.
He literally said those words out loud just days before Sarah tried to drug Miles to sleep.
Of course the boy's awake, ya dingus!
He's possessed by an evil fake-sleeping genius!
So when Miles suddenly shows up in the kitchen, it's because Scarka was in control the whole
time, waiting patiently until the right moment to strike.
And it isn't long before we find out how much control he actually has.
At this point in The Prodigy, two things are clear: Scarka is more powerful than we'd realized,
and Sarah is kind of a terrible mom.
Put them together, and the plan that's been unfolding in secret this whole time suddenly
comes to light.
Everything that Sarah has been doing to help her son — kicking her husband out of the
house, driving to Ohio, trying to kill St. James — has all been carefully orchestrated
by Scarka.
Why?
Well, Scarka really does want to kill Margaret St. James, like Sarah guessed, but he's stuck
in the body of a minor.
He can't just hop in the car and drive there himself.
To that end, he's been subtly manipulating Sarah from the start.
Remember when Sarah learns about Edward Scarka on her laptop at night, with Miles lurking
in the next room?
Sarah wasn't coming closer to stopping Scarka with that knowledge, as audiences were led
to believe — Scarka was letting her discover the awful truth on purpose.
Those breadcrumbs run through the entire film.
A baseboard is just so carefully left askew, leading Sarah to discover a hidden stash of
information on St. James.
At her most vulnerable moments, Miles surfaces as a scared, innocent boy, stringing Sarah
along with the hope that she still has a chance to fix him.
In the film's final twist, we realize that killing St. James wasn't the miracle cure
Sarah had been hoping for.
Scarka's still in control of Miles' body, and he's not planning on going anywhere anytime
soon.
After manipulating Sarah into taking him to St. James, Scarka now has another problem
on his hands: Sarah.
With John on life support in the hospital and Jacobson cowed into silence, Sarah is
the last person who could threaten his new life.
She's gotta go.
Ever manipulative, Scarka baits her with the truth: Miles is gone.
She's too late.
In fact, he claims that Miles hasn't been part of the equation since at least the halfway
point of the movie.
All of Jacobson's talk about a "war between souls" really meant nothing, because Scarka
already destroyed the part of him that was Miles.
Sarah takes the bait, threatening her son with the same gun she'd planned to use on
St. James.
It went down sort of like this:
"See you in hell, dinner plate."
Except she goes through with it, because all that ruckus draws the attention of a farmer,
who shoots Sarah before she can pull the trigger.
Once again, Sarah is too late.
The final moments of the film see young Miles being dropped off with his new foster family.
All innocence and smiles, the boy steps out of the car to greet his new mom and dad.
In one last scene before the screen cuts to black, we see Miles in his new bedroom with
old man Scarka looking back at him from his reflection in the mirror, because ambiguity
is for suckers.
“ahh!”
The message is clear: Scarka is free to kill again and again.
Even better, he's not a lumpy old man anymore.
He's a young boy who can manipulate anyone with his sweetness, making him the ultimate
wolf in sheep's clothing.
But while that's the ending we see, is it really the ending?
At various times throughout the movie, Miles managed to exert some control over Scarka.
Most notably, he did this when he was being hypnotized by Arthur Jacobson.
Although Scarka seemingly had total control in that scene, Miles still managed to scratch
a legible message into a leather couch with just his fingernails.
That's not an easy thing to do, and it suggests that Miles' mind may still be a bigger presence
than Scarka is willing to admit … maybe even bigger than Scarka realizes.
After finishing off his final victim, Scarka tells Sarah in no uncertain terms that her
little boy is gone forever.
Miles hasn't actually been in there for awhile.
He doesn't even try to let her down easy, after all that she did for him.
Real mature, Scarka.
"I'm sure that we can handle the situation maturely just like the responsible adults
that we are.
"Isn’t that right, Mr. Poopy Pants."
But hold on, because lies come in many forms throughout The Prodigy.
Jacobson also made it clear that Scarka is a masterful liar and a genius manipulator,
so who's to say where his lies actually end?
Would he admit to Sarah that part of Miles is still alive in there somewhere?
Not if he wanted her to wave a gun at him so that hero farmer would step in.
He'd pretend to have full control over the boy's body.
But does he really?
It's entirely possible that Miles is still in there somewhere, and he's still capable
of coming back and stopping Scarka in the future.
With a movie like this, anything's possible, whether it makes sense...or not.
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