The Son – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Son – first-look review

07 Sep 2022

Words by Hannah Strong

A pensive man with a serious expression, wearing a black jumper, in a dimly lit setting.
A pensive man with a serious expression, wearing a black jumper, in a dimly lit setting.
Despite boast­ing some big names, Flo­ri­an Zeller’s fol­low-up to The Father is a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to tack­le the weighty sub­ject of teen depression.

With The Father, Flo­ri­an Zeller cre­at­ed a claus­tro­pho­bic, deeply affect­ing cham­ber piece on the sub­ject of demen­tia that earned Antho­ny Hop­kins his sec­ond Acad­e­my Award. His fol­low-up fea­ture is an adap­ta­tion of anoth­er play in his tril­o­gy – The Son – but unfor­tu­nate­ly fails to make the same emo­tion­al impact as his strong debut, despite a star­ry cast and wor­thy sub­ject matter.

Sev­en­teen-year-old Nicholas (Zen McGrath) has been strug­gling since his par­ents Kate (Lau­ra Dern) and Peter (Hugh Jack­man) divorced. Peter now lives with Beth (Vanes­sa Kir­by), the woman he left his wife for, and they have an infant son togeth­er, while Nicholas lives with his moth­er. After learn­ing that their son has been skip­ping school for over a month, Kate and Peter con­front Nicholas, who admits he is strug­gling with his men­tal health and wish­es to live with Peter, Beth and baby Theo. Despite Beth’s ini­tial reser­va­tions he moves in with them, and things seem to be improv­ing for Nicholas, at least for a lit­tle while.

Where The Father deft­ly nav­i­gat­ed the dis­ori­en­tat­ing impact of demen­tia upon both the per­son with the con­di­tion and those close to them, The Son fails to find quite such sure foot­ing in its depic­tion of ado­les­cent depres­sion and sui­ci­dal ideation, in part because we expe­ri­ence this large­ly through Peter rather than Nicholas, whose char­ac­ter is so thin­ly realised it’s an uphill bat­tle for McGrath to give him any sort of dimen­sion. We know he’s depressed, and it’s large­ly a result of his feel­ings of rejec­tion fol­low­ing his father leav­ing his moth­er, but there’s pre­cious lit­tle else to Nicholas – no sense of his inter­ests, per­son­al­i­ty, or aspi­ra­tions beyond vague ref­er­ences to him want­i­ng to be a writer. When Peter refers to how clever and sen­si­tive his son is, it’s lazy short­hand for char­ac­ter devel­op­ment that isn’t embed­ded in the script.

The dia­logue itself is stagey and uncon­vinc­ing, as though lit­tle has been done to adapt Zeller’s orig­i­nal play, and while these height­ened exchanges worked with­in the con­cep­tu­al fram­ing of The Father, here they seem clunky and awk­ward – this is a more con­ven­tion­al approach to dra­ma, although the play was set entire­ly in Peter and Beth’s apart­ment. Per­haps Zeller didn’t want to risk hue­ing too close­ly to The Father, but by opt­ing for a more open set­ting some of the inti­ma­cy of The Son is lost.

The sub­ject of depres­sion and sui­ci­dal thoughts in teenagers is still sur­round­ed by stig­ma, and many par­ents strug­gle to speak to their chil­dren about the top­ic – in the­o­ry, The Son has a rich, wor­thy sub­ject at its cen­ter. But the film feels bina­ry in its think­ing, and while we’re told that Peter is doing every­thing he can to recon­nect with his son and help to change his self-destruc­tive thought pat­terns and behav­iours, there’s lit­tle evi­dence to back this up. Even the mag­net­ic likes of Jack­man, Dern and Kir­by are wast­ed here, to the extent that by the time The Son reach­es its mis­er­able fore­gone con­clu­sion, it’s a relief to be free of the unin­spired direc­tion and paint-by-num­bers inter­ro­ga­tion of a sub­ject that deserves much more depth.

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