When it comes to Macaulay Culkin, it’s safe to say his most iconic performance is in Home Alone. It revamped the children’s comedies in the ’90s, as his Kevin McCallister wreaked havoc against the bandits who tried to break into his home, and who then came after him again in New York. However, as funny as that franchise was, Culkin’s best role was in something much darker — The Good Son.
Here, he played Henry in a psychological thriller that had shades of The Omen to it. But rather than being an Antichrist like Damien was in that horror series, Culkin was a mere sociopath who never flinched at the thought of death.
In fact, he enjoyed it, which is what alarmed his cousin, Mark (Elijah Wood), who came to stay with the family after his own mom died. But what ensued was a totally spine-tingling series of events that allowed Culkin to show his demonic range in an unsettling movie that left parents wondering what really lurked beneath in the psyche of a child.
It was part of the deal Culkin’s family made with 20th Century Fox so he could star in the subsequent Home Alone sequel, and while it was understandable how critics didn’t like it for its pacing and plot flaws, it’s hard to deny Culkin was a tour de force.
In Home Alone, he was one-dimensional, portraying an innocent child making cheesy jokes and setting traps, but in The Good Son, he wasn’t an underdog — he was a master manipulator. He puppet mastered things to fool his parents and psychologist into thinking he was coy and innocent, gaslighting them to think Mark had a fractured psyche due to his trauma, grief and loss.
This allowed Henry to smoke, build weapons, commit animal cruelty, drop a doll off a bridge and cause a highway smash-up, threaten to kill his own little sister, Connie, while admitting later on that he drowned his brother, Richard. He also tried to kill his mom at the end, delivering an array of personalities that felt more adult. It was best summed up by his iconic line, “Don’t fuck with me, Mark,” which made it seem like he’d toss the boy off their tree house to keep the charade up after he couldn’t corrupt the kid.
Culkin portrayed a stone-cold killer, which left the audience in disbelief that their cute Kevin McCallister was doing all this. Given Connie was played by Macaulay’s own sister, Quinn, it was all the more disturbing because him dropping her in an ice pond, then pretending to rescue her felt so real. From his dead stares to sinister smiles, all this compounded how mature he was; an actor well ahead of his time which is what the likes of John Candy, John Hughes and Chris Columbus always said. As such, with this homicidal take, Macaulay delivered his best role, which not even his later movies were able to replicate.
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