My Miracle Boy: Psychological Horror and Coming of Age in One

Sarab Sahni’s My Miracle Boy (writing credits shared between Caroline Gordon Elliott, Alam Virk, and Sahni) contains the sparks of something better than itself, its elusive glint catching the eye as if only to give chase. The story of a woman terrified to lose her only child, and so, like Rapunzel and every predecessor before and after, the film sees Jason kept sheltered from the outside world on the premise that it is both dangerous and dead. 

Jason (Micah Juman) is in his teens, and a party means just him, his mother (Mary Paige Snell), and the framed photos of his dead siblings. They live a perfectly functional life—replete with running water and electricity—if not a very peaceful one where Elizabeth is concerned, whose paranoia about losing Jason is the first thing viewers learn about this world. But when Jason discovers a stray flyer in his backyard garden (the Biblical connotation sitting right there), it upends the foundations of their life that Elizabeth had painstakingly put in place. 

Jason goes out into the world, bringing on a panic in Elizabeth that the viewer rightly expects to surpass anything they are already familiar with. The camera follows right on her heels, a frantic search through the large house that feels terribly claustrophobic in moments like these. Snell carries the film, bringing out Elizabeth’s instability just right but the edges of the character’s menacing presence are softer than they should be. The paranoia induced fury is by turns frightening and pitiable, but it is also sometimes just a little hollow. 

As for the worldbuilding, it obviously cannot be taken seriously, what with the shiny, spacious house, its pretty garden and everything running just fine. If there was an apocalypse, it was clearly a lot later than covid. Instead, it makes for a more interesting movie if you read it as a Biblical/psychoanalytical allegory on coming of age. An anti-Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret, if you will. 

What My Miracle Boy manages to get spot-on is the intense discomfort that characters such as Elizabeth can elicit (and there have been many like her). With sufficient distance, the sorry state of her existence evokes sympathy. But with the freakishness made centre stage as it is here, sympathy is an afterthought. 

Watch My Miracle Boy Short Film Trailer