This is not what it sounds like. It is approximately a kids' mystical adventure movie, on the order of The Black Stallion, except for a nude sex scene, followed by what looks like a surgical procedure that I didn't understand. In structure this is a suspense movie, but the suspense is limited to escape and pursuit; the mystical or metaphysical element--the child's visions, the scientific-occult conspiracy to which he is delivered, and so forth--which one would expect to be churned into melodrama, as the same situation was in The Fury, is presented matter-of-factly, rather as magic realism.
Alastair Crowley's novel of the same title has a different plot, but may still have inspired the movie, because it also involves a scheme by an occult group to generate a child with magical powers, and the film has about it an air of the 20s, as perhaps of Rex Ingram (one of whose films concerned a fictional Crowley).
The story has flaws: e.g. it forgets that the main characters have "wild talents," and so their escape and pursuit is a matter of mundane running and hiding; for someone in the clutches of an authoritarian group with a recruited cadre of psychics, the child is able to sneak in and out very easily; characters' affections and determinations change without warning--all of which suit the kids' movie this (almost) is.
Alastair Crowley's novel of the same title has a different plot, but may still have inspired the movie, because it also involves a scheme by an occult group to generate a child with magical powers, and the film has about it an air of the 20s, as perhaps of Rex Ingram (one of whose films concerned a fictional Crowley).
The story has flaws: e.g. it forgets that the main characters have "wild talents," and so their escape and pursuit is a matter of mundane running and hiding; for someone in the clutches of an authoritarian group with a recruited cadre of psychics, the child is able to sneak in and out very easily; characters' affections and determinations change without warning--all of which suit the kids' movie this (almost) is.