If you don’t have kids, you’ll probably come out of The Son shaken and deeply moved. If you have children, you may eventually need to be put back on your feet after collapsing in a fetal ball for several hours.
Writer-director Florian Zeller’s second installment in his trilogy examining mental health is an emotional wrecking ball that’s almost exquisite in its destructive power. If his previous film, The Father, needed a triggering warning about dementia, The son needs it for depression and suicide.
Despite the title, The Son is really about the father in this story, Peter, a successful workaholic Manhattan lawyer about his second wife and second child, a newborn. Past and present collide when Nicholas, the 17-year-old son from his first marriage, reaches a crescendo of mental anguish.
That’s life. It weighs on me. I want something to change, but I don’t know what,” he shouts. My head feels like it’s exploding.
But neither dad Hugh Jackman, in easily his best on-screen work, nor mom, Laura Dern in another heartfelt performance, can seem to help. Zen McGrath plays the son in jaw-dropping agony, his hooded eyes twinkling as if he’s being chased.
Zeller, again adapting his play for the screen with translator and co-screenwriter Christopher Hampton, grounds it all in unflinching realism, letting the words carry and avoiding any visual artifice except a shaky camera when she focuses on Nicholas.
A silent symbol that returns is that of Peter often shown at a bank of elevators, his vertical world rising and falling. But in his house, the filmmakers show a washing machine that constantly beats the lines against the circles.
None of the parents in this high-class world, including stepmother Beth played by Vanessa Kirby, seem to know how to help this young man stuck in domestic no-man’s-land or even how to talk to him.
Peter from Jackman addresses his son as if he were in a sales meeting (Soon everything will be back to normal) and even offers him a fist bump. He and his mother have choppy shorthand, with broken dialogue. (Call me, don’t… and don’t cry, my little sunshine.)
Restless and mentally ill, the son goes from one parent’s house to another, skipping school and wandering around the city. What will you become? his father asks, confusing the byproduct with the root problem.
In a heartbreaking scene, dad, stepmother and son are dancing in their living room to Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual and the camera soon closes in on the adults who are smiling happily as they let loose, unaware that the son has long since given up.
The son’s anger at his father for leaving his mother buries the film in a guilt that gnaws at the father, who begins to doze off in meetings. He then has a wonderfully tense visit with his own father (Anthony Hopkins, although he doesn’t play the same role in The Father.) Peter tells him he might turn down a job to care for his son, which her father sees it as a dig at her own absent parenthood. What do you want, applause? chuckles the father. Move on.
All the while Nicolas calls for help. I’m not well, mom, I’m not made like the others and I think I will never be up to it. He cuts himself off and has no friends. Viewers will be unable to shake a growing sense of dread, that the son needs something his parents can’t give him. This love is not enough, as a psychiatrist says.
The film’s only flashbacks are a sunny vacation in Corsica back when the first marriage was strong and Nicholas was 6 and learning to swim for the first time. It was dad who encouraged him to try his first shots alone. Knowing the waves of grief to come almost hurts physically.
The Son, a Sony Pictures Classics release that opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 25 and will expand to theaters nationwide on January 20, is rated PG-13 for its mature thematic content, suicide and his foul language. Duration: 124 minutes. Three and a half out of four stars.
MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned. Some content may be inappropriate for children under 13.