The Son never rises
Nicholas Coccoma
Florian Zeller’s latest picture, The Son, chronicles the descent of a depressed teenager named Nicholas into suicide, and by the end, you may wish to join him. It’s hard to believe the movie emanated from the same director who made The Father two years ago. That film, compelled by Anthony Hopkins’s performance, gave you the felt experience of a mind falling apart under dementia. Zeller achieved this phenomenological effect by merging the theater of the absurd with realism: i.e., the scenes are filmed realistically, but they’re edited together to induce a sense of madness. Like its title character, you can never tell what’s actually happening and what’s a mental trick. You share his horror and desperation at the loss of lucidity as he spirals.
Zeller sets up The Son for a similar approach but falls on his face. Despite the title, the movie’s told from the point of view of Nicholas’s father, Peter (Hugh Jackman), who works as a midtown executive to support his second wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their newborn. Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is the product of his first marriage and lives with Peter’s ex, Kate (Laura Dern). Kate shows up at Peter’s sleek, modernist apartment one day at her wit’s end: Nicholas, she’s learned, hasn’t attended school for a month, instead wandering the streets in a funk. She hints at conflict with the gloomy boy, and Peter decides to take him in after Nicholas says he can’t stand it with his mother.
The rest of the movie charts the fallout. Peter puts Nicholas in a new school and psychotherapy, thinking things will improve. But then, Beth finds a knife under the child’s pillow, and Peter discovers he’s still playing hooky. A series of ham-fisted confrontations ensue, in which the father fails to understand what’s eating his son, leading the latter to cut his wrist. He’s admitted to a psych hospital, but this only makes matters worse, as he demands his parents free him from the hellhole against the dire warnings of the doctors. What will they do?
It’s not hard to guess what will happen, oppressed as you are by ominous music and glaring giveaways. The film is a dirge, marching you to its inevitable conclusion. The director goes for tragedy, but what he achieves is a farce since nothing and no one makes sense. Nicholas’s parents are affluent professionals in Manhattan, yet they act as if they’ve never heard of mental illness. Their reactions to their son’s mood feel ripped from social problem films of the ‘40s or ‘50s, before depression became a household word. Zeller would honestly have us think that parents in 2022 wouldn’t know about the national epidemic of teenage angst. Every child in America’s on behavioral medication for something, and New York’s the therapy capital of the world. But Peter walks through the film, first oblivious, then in denial, and finally crushed by the unspeakable blow. His son’s sad!
The picture’s so blunt it feels like a well-made play in which you prepare for the revelation of some shattering secret. But Zeller keeps hitting you with the same obvious point: Nicholas is depressed. You can’t believe that’s all there is, though. So when Kate tells Peter the boy has a scary look in his eye or isn’t “like other kids,” you wonder what sinister truth you’re in for. Is he killing cats? Sleeping with his mother? Possessed by demons? In one bizarre montage, Nicholas stares out slowly in class as Zeller cuts to Kate doing the same thing at work. This is outdone only later when Zeller pans to the brooding boy while Peter and Beth have an impromptu dance party. Other moments suggest mother and son are in league either to exact revenge on Peter or steal him back from the homewrecker Beth. The boy walks in on her getting it on with his father in the living room (who’d attempt that when your adolescent son’s down the hall?) and later pointedly questions her about why she broke up Peter’s marriage. When he sneaks into his half-brother’s bedroom later and inspects his crib, your stomach churns.
But no devious device is sprung, except the trap Zeller throws the audience into when Nicholas is at the hospital. During this reprehensible scene, the medical staff members are repeatedly interrupted from explaining the boy’s condition to his bewildered parents (which would never happen), then force Peter and Kate to choose, as he screeches in front of them, whether to release the boy or continue his confinement. Such emotional manipulation makes you want to swing at Zeller the way the son swings at them after they assent to the doctor’s heavy-handed will. The guilt the doc lays on them is overcome only by the shame they feel in betraying the boy, prompting them to change course. Somehow, Nicholas is released without a phone call to his shrink, a discharge plan to a partial program, or instructions to remove any weapons from his home. You’d think Peter would do this anyway, given that Nicholas asks midway through the picture about the rifle his father keeps in the laundry room. And because, you know, he cut himself. Zeller clearly didn’t consult with anyone in the mental health field or an actual patient.
Nicholas is a mere prop, given neither personality nor interior life. Even depressed children have hobbies, but Nicholas has zero friends and no interests. As for his therapy, we get one shot of him with his doctor, who disappears for the rest of the film, along with any report of what’s come of their sessions. We never even see what the boy does all day when skipping class. And are we really supposed to buy that the school wouldn’t call his folks on the phone? Or reply to the fake email Nicholas sends from his father’s account? Or request a parent-teacher conference with Peter? How did any of this get past the team at Sony, let alone test audiences?
Meanwhile, the empty dialogue and misdirection leave the cast exposed. Only Dern, with her emotional purity, escapes unscathed — barely. Zeller makes painful asks of McGrath; no one would look good in his shoes. Kirby, terrific in The Crown and elsewhere, is wasted here. As for Jackman, he oscillates between two registers: clueless smiles and blunt anger. The Australian can be effective in parts in which his plastic smile and physicality befit the character, such as Gary Hart in The Front Runner (2018). But he has no depths, and his attempts to reveal them at the climactic moments are excruciating. Zeller makes a stab at exploring the family origins of Nicholas’s illness, as Peter has a disastrous visit with his own father while on business in Washington. Hopkins plays the elder, temporarily bringing some spark to the film. But he savages Peter so brusquely and inexplicably that you throw up your hands. Peter’s left moaning on the floor at its close, but it might as well be you — and not for the reasons Zeller intends. The Son wouldn’t fly if it were on Afterschool Special.
Nick Coccoma is a Boston writer and critic who’s been published in New Politics, Critics at Large, and Full-Stop. Follow him on Substack at the Similitude and @NickCoccoma.