‘The Unbreakable Boy’ Review: Zachary Levi Plays the Father of an Autistic Child in Faith-Based Drama Well Beyond Salvation – IndieWire
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We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.The thing about separating the art from the artist is that people are typically a lot more inclined to do so if the “art” isn’t a generic piece of faith-based schlock, and the “artist” hasn’t made a variety of disqualifying comments that pertain directly to the subject of their latest film. Case in point: It’s tough to accept Zachary Levi as the beleaguered father of an autistic child when the former “Shazam!” star has publicly sworn his allegiance to a man who believes that vaccines cause autism. In a perfect vacuum, I suppose it would be possible to watch “The Unbreakable Boy” as a benign — if uncommonly basic — addition to the ever-growing subgenre of “inspirational” movies in which neurodivergent munchkins are used as human props for their parents’ spiritual growth. In a perfect vacuum, it would be possible to imagine how Kingdom Story Company’s (“I Still Believe,” “Jesus Revolution,” etc.) latest appeal to megachurch America might serve as a flimsy source of comfort for some hypothetical couple who’s struggling to raise a child with intellectual differences — a struggle that will only get a whole lot harder if the administration Levi supports decides to eliminate the DOE, which could severely impact the learning opportunities available to the kids most at risk of being left behind.
Related Stories IndieWire Hits the 2025 Indie Spirit Awards — Watch Filmmaker and Star Interviews ‘The Monkey’ Director Oz Perkins on His Unusual Relationship to Horror, the Genre He Was Born Into Alas, much as I might wish that Levi only existed in movies that nobody wants to see, his weirdly swole brand of smiling ignorance has made a habit of seeping into the real world against my will. In “The Unbreakable Boy,” which is based on the true story of an Oklahoma kid whose autism diagnosis was compounded by the Osteogenesis imperfecta (or “brittle bone disease”) that he inherited from his mother, Levi’s screen persona gloms onto a family’s lived experience with the inextricability of an alien symbiote. The film may not offer any specific theories as to why its title character was born with certain differences, but clunky screenwriting isn’t the only thing that makes it hard to swallow his father’s climactic epiphany that his son “didn’t need me to fix him” so much as “I needed him to fix me.” Sorry, but having an autistic kid can’t be a gift from God and a curse from Pfizer — you have to pick one or the other.
The good news is that most viewers probably won’t need “The Unbreakable Boy” to convince them of the better choice between those two options. The bad news is that the film does such a poor job of presenting its case that it couldn’t even get through to its own star, who shot the project in the fall of 2020 and has spent the last four years preaching his faith in pseudoscience. Absent the occasional grace that writer-director Jon Gunn was able to weave into his previous film (2024’s “Ordinary Angels,” which he actually made several years after this one), “The Unbreakable Boy” kicks off with a false note that only hits flatter every time it’s played, as Austin’s (Jacob Laval) violently cute narration comes to underscore the degree to which his character is absent from the on-screen drama. From the opening flashforward, in which Austin’s father Scott (Levi) is a drunken mess at a Christmas party with his two sons in tow (Gavin Warren plays Austin’s neurotypical little brother Logan), it’s clear that Gunn’s script will only see Austin as a lens through which to focus his father’s spiritual crisis. The kid’s bones might be weak, but they belie the inner strength that Scott has always somehow lacked within himself — even though his shoulder muscles are large enough to carry any cross on Earth.
The more we learn about the specifics of Austin’s condition, the more they feel like a detail of his parents’ circumstances. Following its prologue, “The Unbreakable Boy” rewinds the clock to walk us through the story of how a hulking medical supply salesman wooed a video game-obsessed clothing store clerk named Teresa (a wildly overqualified Meghann Fahy), only to impregnate her on their third date. In a film so rooted in social puritanism, that development can’t help but feel like divine punishment for not waiting until marriage — a read that’s only somewhat complicated by the reveal that Teresa has been married twice before. Abortion is obviously out of the question, but it’s strange that Teresa, whose mild Osteogenesis imperfecta only makes her eyes more beautiful, cries at the thought of her child inheriting a genetic disorder that she neglects to test Austin for once he’s actually born. It isn’t until a few years later that Scott and Teresa discover the fragility of their son’s body, and there isn’t a parent alive who wouldn’t feel for the agonies that poor Austin and his parents are made to endure. While the Kingdom Story Company ethos prevents “The Unbreakable Boy” from dwelling on the heartache of Austin’s constant injuries (soft music and speedy montages are used to pave over anything too painful for God’s plan to offset), the nature of Austin’s condition forces the film to include a small handful of genuinely difficult moments, particularly when Austin grows older and begins to require more specific care than his school might be able to provide.
As in most of today’s “faith-based” films, however (almost all of which are likewise based on true stories), the specifics of such hardships are significantly less important than how they lead the people suffering from them to the altar of God’s love. We note that Austin has an affinity for wearing jester hats, that he’s bullied at school, and that his active imagination apparently inspires him to memorize certain monologues from “A Few Good Men,” but the character is largely sanded down to a toothy smile and a nagging sense that his dad always feels “close and far away at the same time, like even though I’m right there he doesn’t really see me.” He might as well be describing the film itself. Nuance is anathema to a form of storytelling that sees faith as the answer to all of life’s obstacles, just as style has no place in a movie that hopes to bypass the eyes and go straight for your heart, and so “The Unbreakable Boy” soon falls into the same familiar rhythm as so many other movies like it: Joy is followed by hardship, hardship is followed by a vague hint of the ineffable, and the ineffable gives way to more hardship until the protagonist is willing to name the source of that wonder. If one scene finds Austin and Teresa dancing in their living room (mother and son taking pleasure in one of the only physical activities their bodies will allow them to perform safely), the next will invariably see Teresa sitting at the kitchen table and shaking her head at hospital bills under a blanket of sad piano music. The one after that? Maybe Scott crossing paths with a glinty-eyed stranger in the bathroom at church (producer Peter Facinelli), or having a heart-to-heart with the imaginary best friend he’s had since childhood (a gregariously charming Drew Powell). “My dad is like Tyler Durden in ‘Fight Club’!,” Austin’s narration declares. “I flippin’ love that movie!”
Needless to say, nothing that happens in “Fight Club” is even half as implausible as the idea that the parents in a Kingdom Story Company film would ever let their pre-teen son watch “Fight Club.” A generous interpretation might argue that “The Unbreakable Boy” spins in circles as an expression of Scott’s broken moral compass, but the movie never bothers to articulate the ambitions he was so pissed to put on ice after Austin was born. He wanted to move to New York, I guess? We need a little more than that to appreciate why Scott is such an unsatisfied father for the first 12 years of his son’s life, or to appreciate what he might have been doing if Austin hadn’t required so much extra care, and the empty affect of Levi’s performance only adds to the sense that he’s ambiguously ungrateful for the family he’s created. That, in and of itself, is a relatable phenomenon (raising kids is rarely easy enough to appreciate how fulfilling it is), but it’s not a whole lot to build a movie around, especially at the expense of an autistic kid with brittle bone disease and an Xbox-addicted mom who’s forced to contend with an alcoholic husband in addition to her own guilt about passing her genetic baggage along to their first child. But keeping the problems vague allows a movie like this to keep their solutions vague as well, only for the vagueness of both to be comically offset by the emotional skywriting of Levi’s performance, which finds the actor stretching every emotion across his entire face until they’re all as transparent as the scene where Scott’s mother (Patricia Heaton) deliberately shatters a teacup so that he can piece it back together during the montage that covers his stint in AA.
In the abstract, there’s no denying that “The Unbreakable Boy” is a sweet and well-meaning schmaltz about a family who finds its greatest strength in the very struggles that threaten to tear it apart — and also in Jesus Christ, of course, whose influence is relegated to the briefest of name-checks during the closing moments. But the strength this film exists to celebrate is directly contradicted by the weaknesses of its storytelling. “The Unbreakable Boy” may not pose the same threat as a piece of entertainment that its leading man does as a public figure, but it similarly expresses no real interest in — or understanding of — what autism is, and there’s no point in trying to separate the art from the artist in the context of a movie that only ever sees itself as a means to an end.Lionsgate will release “The Unbreakable Boy” in theaters on Friday, February 21.Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy.
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