Grabbing for The Jugular

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: THE GOOD SON

DIRECTOR: JOSEPH RUBEN

WRITER: IAN McEWAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Macauley Culkin plays against type in a no-frills thriller that grippingly evokes primal fears.

Joseph Ruben's apparent mission in life is to turn the commonplaces of family dysfunction into worst-case scenarios. Everyone at some time or another imagines comfortable domesticity going radically wrong. Ruben gives this uneasy feeling -- that we all may be no more than a mischance or two away from reading our names in a tabloid headline -- grabby if sometimes almost comically simple life on the screen. In Ruben's The Stepfather, that eponymous figure turns out to be -- his stepchildren guess it! -- a serial killer. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts' character fakes her own death trying to escape the husband from hell.

In The Good Son, the director taps yet another nasty, not entirely uncommon fantasy. What if a child's normal mischievousness -- a compound of forgivable prankishness, a bit of secretiveness, some expectable sibling rivalry -- is not just a boyish phase? What if it is actually the first sprouting of a very bad seed? Meet Henry Evans (Macaulay Culkin). Who would believe that polite, sweet-smiling Henry is actually the devil's spawn? Not his doting parents, who are still grieving over the presumably accidental death of his younger brother. Not his visiting cousin Mark (Elijah Wood), who is also in mourning for his recently deceased mother and eager at first to overlook a few scary eccentricities. Not the audience -- not for a while, anyway. We want Culkin's screen character to remain the beleaguered, adorable innocent of the Home Alone pictures.

As he does in his bleak, spare novels, screenwriter Ian McEwan uses very simple means to establish an air of menace. The death of a neighborhood dog, a spectacular multivehicle auto accident, the near death of Henry's little sister in an ice-skating incident -- Henry's role in all these can be explained away by people with a vested interest in maintaining their tranquillity. Ultimately, cousin Mark awakens Henry's mother (a very believable Wendy Crewson) to long-suppressed suspicions, which leads to a stark and indescribable climax -- literally a cliffhanger, but one so nervy and straightforward that it puts you in mind of old-fashioned B movies.

That's what's good about Ruben. He doesn't mess around with nuance. He sticks to the psychological basics and the most primitive scare tactics. Nothing distracts him from arriving, via the shortest possible distance, at some not exactly subtle but inescapably gripping point. It ain't art. Nobody's ever going to call him the new Hitchcock. But there's something admirable in his disdain for high, fancy stepping, his heedlessly efficient drive to put us in touch with the primal ooze of our worst imaginings.