As a kid, my idea of mischief was pretty standard: shaking up two-liter bottles of soda right before family gatherings, or the legendary shitting in a mason jar — planting it under my sister’s bed and waiting for the inevitable discovery. You assume she’ll find it immediately. Instead, months later, your horrified mom unearths it while cleaning. Classic kid stuff. There’s a fine brown line between mischief and psychopathy. Henry Evans doesn’t just cross it — he doesn’t even see it exists.
Macaulay Culkin spent 1990 as the kid every burglar in America was afraid of. HOME ALONE’s whole premise runs on a boy resourceful enough to booby-trap an entire house with paint cans and a blowtorch, and lovable enough that nobody in the movie — or in the audience — seriously worries that he might be the one doing something wrong. Henry Evans runs on the exact same equipment. He builds dangerous things out of household junk. He looks adults in the eye and says nothing is wrong. He sends a mannequin tumbling from an overpass into highway traffic, then flashes that “I made my family disappear” grin. The difference is that Kevin’s violence happens in a cartoon universe where burglars bounce back, while Henry’s crossbow does not know the difference between a home invader and a dog. Ask Kevin what else he did while the family was away and he shrugs: “Just hung around.” Ask the adults in THE GOOD SON what Henry has been doing, and for most of the movie you get the same answer — except this time, somebody ought to be worried.
After his mother dies, Mark Evans is sent to stay with his aunt, uncle, and cousins in Maine. Henry, the oldest cousin, initially looks like the kind of clever, self-assured kid who might pull Mark out of his grief. He is clever, at least.
The masks come before any of it: before the dog, before the overpass, before Mark understands what he’s looking at. Henry hands Mark one and keeps its twin for himself. “I made two of ’em, so we could be brothers.” It reads, in the moment, like an ordinary bid for friendship, the kind of thing a well-adjusted kid might say to a cousin he wants to feel close to. Except Henry already had a brother, and Richard is dead, and the word does a lot of quiet work once you notice it’s there. The mask isn’t a toy. It’s a loyalty test disguised as a gift: proof that Mark can be like him, will keep quiet like him, wants what he wants. Everything Henry does to Mark for the rest of the movie is a version of that same ask.
None of this happened by accident. Jesse Bradford had already been cast as Henry when Kit Culkin refused to sign Macaulay for HOME ALONE 2 unless Fox gave him THE GOOD SON as well. The demand pushed production back nearly a year. Mary Steenburgen, originally cast as Susan, became unavailable and was replaced by Wendy Crewson; director Michael Lehmann left before Joseph Ruben came aboard. Principal photography finally began within days of HOME ALONE 2 opening in theaters. Fox wasn’t casually reusing its most bankable child star. It was trying to sell the same face twice in the space of a year: first as the ingenious little boy who protects his family, then as the ingenious little boy his family needs protection from. Whatever the studio intended, a fair number of parents must have encountered THE GOOD SON on a video-store shelf expecting the kid who booby-trapped a house and instead got the kid who shoots a marina dog with a homemade crossbow.
MIKEY had tried the killer-kid premise a year earlier without any of that baggage, and it shows. Nobody watching Brian Bonsall spends the first act unsure what they’re looking at; the movie identifies him almost immediately, the way a slasher movie identifies its monster. THE GOOD SON’s real innovation isn’t a better script. It’s a bigger, more specific persona to hide behind.
The dog dies too early. Henry shoots it with the crossbow before Mark, or the audience, has had any real time to wonder whether he’s reckless, disturbed, or dangerous — three very different kids who could all end up doing the same terrible thing for different reasons. A reckless kid does it by accident and panics. A disturbed kid does it and then can’t look at what he’s done. Henry does neither. He aims, he fires, and his face doesn’t change. The movie closes off the first two readings in a single scene, and once it does, there’s no mystery left to sustain, only the duller question of how long everyone around Henry can keep failing to notice what he already showed us. There’s a version of this movie that lingers in that uncertainty a while longer. THE GOOD SON isn’t interested in lingering. It draws its line in the first act, then spends the rest of the runtime waiting for its own characters to catch up.
None of this is Henry’s first time. The film keeps circling back to his younger brother Richard, dead before the story starts, and the way Henry talks about him makes clear the family’s tragedy didn’t begin with Mark’s visit. It began years earlier, in the same house, under the eyes of the same parents. What makes Henry’s evil clearest isn’t simply what he may have done to Richard. It’s that he has watched his mother grieve the boy ever since and appears entirely untouched by it. Whatever happened to Richard, Wallace and Susan accepted it as an accident, and apparently nothing over the years that followed ever gave them reason to question that conclusion. Neither did his teachers. A kid doesn’t get this practiced at deception by starting the week Mark shows up. He gets that practiced over years, in a small town, in front of the people paying closer attention to him than anyone else alive.
There’s a version of this confusion that’s already been played for laughs. In “The Thing and I,” a Treehouse of Horror segment from 1996, Bart’s parents reveal a secret twin, Hugo, locked in the attic for years because a test at birth marked him as the evil one. The joke depends entirely on which twin gets automatic trust: Hugo, unfamiliar and hidden away, reads as the monster on sight, while Bart, known and loved his whole life, gets the benefit of every doubt right up until a scar on the wrong side proves it was Bart all along. THE GOOD SON runs the same math without the punchline. Mark is the unfamiliar variable in this house, a grieving, recently arrived cousin whose distress reads as instability to almost everyone around him. Henry is the known quantity, the boy this family already decided it understood. Nobody in Rock Harbor needs a scar to tell them which twin to trust. They picked years before Mark arrived, and it never occurred to them they might have picked wrong.
Henry doesn’t outsmart a credible world so much as the movie lowers its standards for credibility whenever he needs room to work. Two boys carry a dead dog through a working marina in broad daylight, and nobody looks up. Susan and Wallace take in a boy whose mother died days earlier and, within that same week, decide this is an excellent time for a date night, leaving three children alone with the relative everybody already trusts. Mark calls his own father to say he’s afraid for his life, and Jack’s advice is to bring it up with the psychologist before hanging up without booking a flight home. None of these people are written as fools anywhere else in the film. They’re only foolish on Henry’s schedule, which has nothing to do with their characters and everything to do with how much freedom he needs at that moment.
By the climax, Susan is dangling from a cliff with a boy in each hand, and the scene needs her to hold that position long enough for a moral crisis to unfold rather than have one arm give out before she can make a choice. The screenplay solves this by promoting her, without comment, from a forty-something mother to someone who could out-deadlift half the cast. It’s the same rigging that has been running through the whole film, only now it’s dressed up as physics instead of an adult failing to notice something. The alternative is a climax that resolves on reflex before the story can extract the anguish it needs. The world hasn’t gone easy on Henry all movie so he can get away with it. By the end, it has gone easy on gravity too, so his mother has time to choose.
Every question the movie has been circling comes due on that cliff. Susan has one hand on each boy and only enough strength to save one, which means the question of where mischief ends and something else begins finally has to produce an answer instead of gesturing at one. She lets go of Henry. It’s the plainest statement the movie makes in ninety minutes: whatever the family failed to see in him for years, his own mother now sees clearly enough to choose against him. The image carries the whole weight on its own. A boy falls toward the rocks below, the ocean carries him away, and the woman who raised him watches him go. Nothing about that needs a voice explaining it.
Then the movie undercuts its own image by explaining it anyway. Mark, back in the Arizona desert where the film opened, narrates that Henry is gone, everyone is safe, and he sometimes lies awake wondering whether Susan would save him again if she had the same choice to make. That doubt belongs to Mark, not Susan, and adds a slightly different question: what made her choose him, and whether she could ever make that choice again. The return to the desert is more purposeful than it first appears. The film has placed Mark there before — alone at his mother’s funeral and again when he bolts from his father’s car — until the landscape becomes a visual shorthand for the isolation he carries with him. Bringing him back there makes sense. Making him explain what he is thinking does not. Mark alone in the desert and Henry disappearing beneath the cliff already leave enough unanswered.
THE GOOD SON has an unsettling idea at its center, and it earns far more of that unsettlement from Culkin’s casting than from its script. A more conventional killer-kid movie like MIKEY has to build its dread from nothing. THE GOOD SON gets to spend two movies’ worth of goodwill it never had to build itself. That’s a real asset, and for about the first act, the movie knows exactly what it has. Then it stops trusting the idea and starts propping it up. It shows its hand with the dog too early, leaving the rest of the movie with nowhere to go but escalation. It needs everyone around Henry to go conveniently blind whenever he needs room to act, from the marina to the cliff. And after building one of the more striking images in a nineties thriller, it still cannot leave the image alone. THE GOOD SON knew exactly what it had. It never trusted that what it had was enough.
Final Verdict: 55 out of 100.