by Robert Bouffard, Editor
In 2020, writer-director Florian Zeller released his first feature film, The Father. It was met with heavy critical acclaim, won two Oscars, and was nominated for four more. It’s also one of my favorite movies of the 2020s so far. It’s the type of film that will leave you an emotional wreck by the time it’s done, and it creates a unique type of empathy that you don’t see from a lot of movies, particularly those about people with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
So when Zeller’s followup film, The Son, was announced, and we learned that it would star Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, and Anthony Hopkins (who won Best Actor for The Father), it seems like we’d be on track for a second consecutive masterpiece, and potentially a Holy Trinity trilogy of films, should Zeller’s third film be titled, The Holy Ghost.
Instead, The Son is one of the most baffling new releases I’ve seen in a long time. I’m tempted to say that it’s terrible or offensive, as the way it deals with teen depression couldn’t have been handled worse, and I want to say that I hated it, but at the end of the day, it’s just so incompetent that saying it’s bad would be giving it way too much credit. Coming out of the theater, I was in a surreal state of shock, and all I had were questions: Were any of these actors ever in the same room together for a scene? Had any of them ever acted before? Has Hugh Jackman ever heard an American accent before? Was this written by an AI?
Of course, these questions are mostly in jest, but there’s a kernel of truth to them as well, especially the AI question. It feels like this prompt was fed into an AI, which then regurgitated some of the most uncanny and unnatural lines of dialogue you’ve ever heard. Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, which is based of Zeller’s own play, is the source of a large chunk of The Son’s problems. It follows Nicholas (Zen McGrath), a high school student who lives with his mom (Dern), but due to problem at school, he wants to go live with his dad (Jackman), his partner (Kirby), and their new baby instead. Both of Nicholas’ parents want to understand what exactly is making him have such a tough time, but he’s having difficulty expressing it.
That’s a good enough starting point; sometimes depression doesn’t feel like it has a clear cause, and that’s an interesting concept to explore. Only, the way Nicholas is written is so incredibly frustrating that you get just as fed up with him as his parents do. This isn’t how it should be — there’s a certain point where, in a conversation between Nicholas and his dad, I realized I was supposed to have been empathizing with Nicholas this whole time, but the problem was that I didn’t at all. All we know is that Nichols is angsty and that no one gets him. And this is a failure on the movie’s part. If you’re not going to give a clear logical reason for why Nicholas feels this way, it’s important to help your audience to buy in emotionally, but the only emotion I was feeling was that aforementioned frustration.
And this wasn’t only frustration towards Nicholas, either. Hampton and Zeller telegraph every story development, large or small. The story follows filmmaking convention, but without a shred of understanding why it’s a developed convention in the first place. On top of that, I’ve seen actors interacting with CGI characters or casting directors have better chemistry with their scene partners than any actors have with each other here. Again, these are world-class actors like Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern. Their shared scenes should’ve had the opportunity to be studied, or at least circulated on Twitter for how good they are. But instead, it seems like a third of their lines consist of one character interrupting the other, or of another one stopping mid-sentence and saying, “Never mind.” While they try to make the most out of wooden dialogue, it’s like watching a professional basketball player try to make it in professional baseball. You see talent there, it’s just being utilized incorrectly. (Hopkins is great, I’ll grant. If he can bring zest and life scenes in Transformers: The Last Knight, then this is a walk in the park.)
At a certain point, I just started thinking that this is a much, much worse version of Beautiful Boy, right down to the names of the main characters being the same. Only, The Son deals with ambiguous teen angst instead of a clearly defined drug addiction that has a relatable quality, even if you’ve never touched drugs in your life. Zeller takes an unnecessarily, and perhaps harmfully, melodramatic approach to the very serious topic of teen depression and self-harm. When you’re trying to make a serious movie about an important topic like this one, you owe it to yourself and to your audience to be better, and The Son fails on all accounts.
Score: 2/10
The Son is currently playing in limited theaters
You can read more from Robert Bouffard, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd