This steely, sinister and utterly gripping movie is the feature debut of 28-year-old actor-turned-director Brady Corbet. It’s an inspired provocation, jabbing its audience with a fictional variant on history, and loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 short story of the same name. Corbet has co-written the screenplay with his partner, film-maker Mona Fastvold. The film imagines the wealthy, dysfunctional and unhappy childhood of someone fated to become a fascist leader: the action, disturbing enough in any case, is retroactively charged with this poisonous destiny. Newcomer Tom Sweet plays Prescott, the unhappy 10-year-old son of an American career diplomat, who is in France in 1919 as part of US president Woodrow Wilson’s retinue, there to establish postwar settlement terms to be imposed at Versailles on the defeated Germans … Prescott himself is a petulant princeling- sociopath who looks a little like Damien in The Omen, and pretty Tadzio in Visconti’s Death in Venice: he is always being mistaken for a girl and refuses to cut his hair. He is also like Anna, the doctor’s daughter in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, that unsettling parable about the childhood of a leader’s entire country … The Childhood of a Leader is structured around Prescott’s tantrums: a conceit that might bring to mind Hitler’s creepy diplomatic practice of pretending to be very angry, while not really being angry at all. This young leader is growing up in a world where all of the adults are telling him about the importance of rejecting anger, embracing forgiveness. The local priest gives sermons on this theme, and Prescott’s tutor makes a deep impression on him with the Aesop fable about the virtues of gentleness in power; the lion who befriends a humble mouse. Yet Prescott can see that power is actually working in quite another direction. It’s a film that exerts a lethal grip, assisted by a clamorous, almost Herrmann- esque orchestral score from Scott Walker. The touch of suppressed psychopathic rage comes from his music. […] What an exciting debut.

Peter Bradshaw,“The Guardian”, 18 August 2016