The Son

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 now wish­es to live with Peter, Beth and baby Theo. Despite Beth’s ini­tial reser­va­tions about hav­ing a men­tal­ly ill teenag­er in the house with her new baby, 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. It’s dif­fi­cult to tell if he is mere­ly mis­cast or under­served by the script.

We know Nicholas is 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 him – 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 or performance.

The dia­logue itself is stagey and uncon­vinc­ing, as though lit­tle has been done to adapt Zeller’s orig­i­nal play for the screen, and while these height­ened exchanges worked with­in the con­cep­tu­al fram­ing of The Father, here they seem clunky and awk­ward – this is a more con­ven­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic approach to dra­ma. While the play was set entire­ly in Peter and Beth’s apart­ment, Zeller opens the world up a lit­tle more here. Per­haps Zeller didn’t want to risk repeat­ing his work on The Father, but by opt­ing for a more open set­ting some of the inti­ma­cy of The Son is lost, and the apart­ment itself where most of Peter and Nicholas’s exchanges take place lacks the intri­cate set design of its predecessor.

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 and could be a pro­gres­sive take on the men­tal health cri­sis fac­ing many ado­les­cents. 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, cloy­ing 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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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