The Godawful 2000 horror thriller Bless the Child Once Again Depicts Neurodivergence as a Superpower

I wept at the end of the 2009 Australian stop-motion animated masterpiece Mary and Max, the previous entry in Autism in Entertainment because it was so true and profound. That was unusual. Usually, when I finish a movie about autism, I scowl and think, “That was bullshit.”

That’s because most movies about autism are only interested in neurodivergence as a cynical plot point. They’re similarly only interested in autistic characters if they’re magical super-geniuses with the power to save the world or kick-start alien evolution.

I am referring specifically to movies like 2000’s Bless the Child. The child at its center isn’t just remarkable: she’s a God. A god! The little girl at the center of Bless the Child is a magical messiah.

In a wholly unconvincing performance, a miscast Kim Basinger stars as Maggie O’Connor. She’s a nice white lady whose marriage ended after she experienced a series of devastating miscarriages.

Basinger’s nurse finds an outlet for her maternal side when her wild child drug addict sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) shows up with baby Cody (Holliston Coleman), a heroin addiction, a messy personal life, and seemingly nowhere to go.

Bettis is nearly two decades younger than Basinger. They do not look anything alike. Basinger is a dreamy blonde goddess, and Bettis is a feral street kid with a punk rock edge. They seem only vaguely familiar with one another, consequently making them comically implausible as siblings.

Speaking of implausibilities, Jenna’s basic pitch is, “Hey, you dumb, infertile bougie bitch. I wanna shoot up drugs and party rather than raise this miniature jerk, so I’m going to leave her with you. If you don’t like it, you can go fuck yourself.”

Maggie is nevertheless happy to take over for her no-account sibling. Cody is no ordinary child, however. She initially exhibits several autistic traits. For example, she stims by making things spin.

First, she does this with her hands. Once it is established that she’s one of those magical autistic super-geniuses ubiquitous in pop culture, if not the actual world, she steps up her game and makes things spin using only her mind.

Maggie has sacrificed to give her vulnerable niece the best possible life. So she is distressed when Jenna reenters her life alongside her husband, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), and wants her child back.

Eric Stark is a former child star who hit a rough patch before evolving into an L. Ron Hubbard-like self-improvement guru and the leader of The New Dawn, an organization that’s like Scientology, only more Satanic.

The creepy cult leader wants to control Cody because he wants to harness her incredible autism superpowers for the benefit of his Lord and Savior, Satan. Jenna is ostensibly clean, sober, and eager to be a mom, but because she is not the stupidest character in film history, Maggie senses that they’re lying and also in league with the evil incarnate.

In a related development, a mysterious serial killer is murdering children all born on the same day. Could this kiddie murder spree be connected to the New Dawn and its members, all of whom look like they shop at the “Satanic Street Chic” section of Hot Topic?

FBI Agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits), a former seminary student who retained his faith even after switching gigs, is on the case. Christina Ricci briefly and pointlessly appears as a tough stranger who delivers exposition about the New Dawn and their sinister end game, which involves, you guessed it, the devil.

To give the devil his due, he is all over this movie, yet he has seldom seemed so hapless and non-scary. Autistic people deserve better representation than what is found here. Heck, Satanists deserve better representation than they receive here.

They’re unGodly, but more than anything, they’re lame and cliched. How is Hollywood supposed to win souls for satan when they’re such sad cliches?

Speaking of representation, the prevalence of the Magical Autistic Child in the films that I have covered for Autism in Entertainment is analogous in some ways to the Magical Negro.

That’s another archetype that’s ostensibly flattering since it depicts African Americans as kind, compassionate, selfless, and magical. But it’s not flattering any more than the cliche of the Magical Autistic Child is flattering because it depicts minorities as supernatural creatures whose value lies in their ability to help the majority learn life lessons and, in this case, at least prevent a Satanic apocalypse.

Depicting autistic people and African Americans as magical and endlessly benevolent is othering and denies their agency and humanity.

To that end, Cody is not a character. She is not a human being; she’s an earth angel conceived in sin and degradation for the specific purpose of keeping a powerful devil worshipper from creating hell on earth.

Maggie begins to realize that there is something very different and special about her niece when the little girl’s room is filled with rats realized through some of the worst CGI of the turn of the decade.

Rizzo the Rat is more believable as a New York rodent than the evil rat horde here. Although Rizzo talks and is a puppet, he’s the picture of verisimilitude compared to the CGI vermin here.

Russell somewhat confusingly directed the 2002 hit The Scorpion King yet is not responsible for the legendarily bad CGI incarnation of the Scorpion King who appears in The Mummy Returns.

The Mask director was nevertheless eager to get in on all of the hot, terrible CGI action, so he made a sixty-million dollar studio movie starring Academy Award winner Kim Basinger, whose production values recall Sharknado more than The Exorcist or The Omen.

The distractingly awful computer animation of the Anti-Christ’s malevolent minions would take audiences out of the film if it had hooked them in at any point. It does not.

Bless the Child travels a perversely straightforward path. Everything in it is exactly how it seems. The former child star turned self-improvement guru seems like he’s doing the devil’s work and has Beezlebub on speed dial. He is! Satanists are evil. Catholics are good. The devil is a liar and a seducer, but God is good.

The Catholics are depicted in an exclusively positive light. They’re never anything other than good, while their enemies are pure evil. Even Catholics might find the film’s depiction of their religion overly generous.

Movies like Bless the Child only highlight what a miracle Mary and Max is. It’s rare and wonderful to encounter a movie that gets autism right when there are so many movies like this that get neurodivergence and everything else so wrong.