“The Son”

Movie Review

Hugh Jackman plays Peter Miller in Florian Zeller's drama "The Son," which also stars Laura Dem as Kate, Venessa Kirby as Beth, Nicholas as Zen McGrath, and Anthony Hopkins as Peter's father. The film's screenplay was co-written by Hugh Jackman and Christopher Hampton.

Beth, Peter Miller's second wife, and their infant boy are being raised together. When Peter's ex-wife Kate arrives, she informs the group that their son Nicholas, 17, is sad and has stopped attending school. Peter offers to host Nicholas despite knowing little about him. Peter's father, who was cruel while he was present in Peter's life, had a poor connection with him. Peter intends to be a decent parent to Nicholas after putting his past experience behind him.

Peter doesn't seem to care that his son has been traumatized by his cheating on Kate with Beth. Nicholas tries suicide and is then admitted to an in-patient treatment center shortly after Peter learns that he has missed school every day since moving in with Peter and Beth. This makes Peter feel bad.

After feeling sympathetic to Nicholas's protestations that he regrets the choices that lead to the facility, Peter and Kate bring Nicholas home a week later. When he gets back home, Nicholas makes tea for his folks and gleefully plans a family movie night. Nicholas shoots himself while his parents talk about how things are improved as he leaves to take a shower. Peter imagines what his life could have been like if Nicholas had lived.

The Father, Florian Zeller's debut film, is a profoundly poignant and potent tale about the agony of dementia and the toll that condition has on his family and those around him. It was released in 2020. Anthony Hopkins won his second Oscar for his depiction of the main character, while the film awarded Zeller and Christopher Hampton an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The first film Zeller made examined a familial dynamic we hardly ever witness, and in doing so, it produced a profoundly moving first work that established Zeller as an engaging director to watch.

The Mother, The Father, and The Son are the first three plays in the trilogy Zeller wrote as a dramatist. The Son, on the other hand, is a movie that never feels authentic and lacks the humanity that made Zeller's first such a masterpiece. The Father, on the other hand, felt like a sincere, candid look at a painful experience.

This kind of familial struggle with serious depression is undoubtedly a subject that should be treated with care and sympathy, similar to dementia in The Father. This is a significant issue that merits a sympathetic examination, which Zeller is unable to offer in this context. The Son is a striking book from beginning to end that only superficially addresses these problems. The Son focuses on the family and how Nicholas' suffering negatively affects them rather than once again demonstrating how afraid and uncertain Nicholas is in this play, as Zeller did with Hopkins' character in The Father.

In principle, these difficult subjects and generational traumas are all fascinating, but The Son treats them all in a stiff and clumsy manner. The Son's performances in various scenes have the impression of aliens attempting to recreate human emotions. Even dependable actors like Jackman and Dern struggle with this material, though at least Jackman gets better as the horrors of this story start to make sense. Kirby is also quite good, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that she is a third party observing these familial conflicts. More regrettably, Nicholas McGrath, a newbie, has a poor performance, and Zeller and Hampton's screenplay doesn't allow him much more to work with besides being a depressed seventeen-year-old. The emotional blackmail Nicholas experiences from Zeller is even worse. For instance, Zeller repeatedly returns to the endlessly spinning washer as a grim warning that the worst still awaits if we ever become too complacent in this novel. Nicholas also states that he is aware that his father keeps a gun in the laundry room. We start to understand how constrained Nicholas feels since Zeller created a universe that is so dark and constricted, even if not in the way that Zeller meant.

Although Zeller's overblown direction and script feel more alien than honest, The Son is an ominous affair lacking the emotional impact that a story like this desperately needs. It attempts to depict the weight of depression, the unpredictable nature of such a mental state, and how that feeling can be unfathomable for those experiencing it.

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