Just a couple of years after making an anvil of a directorial
debut with his 2012 stage play The Fatheradapted into the Oscar winning
2020 Anthony Hopkins’ starring drama of the same name, French playwright
Florian Zeller is back to shake up the hearts and souls of viewers once again
with his latest testament to searing unstoppable human forces.Adapted from Zeller’s 2018 play of the same
name and serving as a prequel of sorts to The Father, the writer-director’s
second foray into feature filmmaking The Son doesn’t quite achieve the
heightened experiential brilliance of its predecessor but is no less
impassioned a cinematic expression and is just as emotionally shattering to witness.With only two features to his name, Florian
Zeller has established himself as maybe the most hurtful dramatist since Lars
Von Trier or Gaspar Noe, not in the sense of transgression but in their almost
effortless ability to get viewers to pour their hearts out.
After his parents Kate (Laura Dern) and Peter Miller (Hugh
Jackman) formally separate as a wedded couple, their teenage son Nicholas (Zen
McGrath) begins experiencing a nervous breakdown resulting in him skipping
school and pathologically lying to both parents.Unable to continue residing with his
biological mother Kate, he begs to move in with Peter and his new partner Beth (Vanessa
Kirby) and their newborn baby son.Wanting to be a better father to Nicholas than his own father Anthony
(Anthony Hopkins) was to him, abandoning his family in pursuit of success,
Peter struggles with balancing his prospective job as a politician in
Washington while trying to get his son settled in compounded with a newly hired
therapist.Things seem fine on the surface,
but over time more erratic peculiarities and obtuse provocative comments and
actions begin surfacing and the troubled youth proceeds to embark further down
the self-destructive spiral. If The Father was about the difficulty of being a son
or daughter, then The Son is the anguished reply of difficulty in being
a parent.Stylistically The Father is
at once fixed and carefully composed while dipping into the hallucinatory while
The Son in contrast is largely grounded in reality with frequent use of
the shaky handheld camera.Both movies
being intensely human stories set within the austere sterility of upper-class
city lifestyle, The Son though thematically related couldn’t be more
different as cinematic animals.Where The
Father drops you into chaos almost immediately without the viewer realizing
it until it’s already too late, The Son is a slow methodical and at
times meticulous journey towards the gradual loss of control that doesn’t
provide all the answers people struggling with this same kind of dilemma are
looking for but it does express their pain with raw honesty.
As with The Father, the film is visually formally
brilliant thanks once again to Ben Smithard who manages to make luxurious apartment
flats and clean offices fraught with tension and growing anxieties.Both movies are the cleanest, most ornate and
even minimally composed settings for such unflinching emotional brutality.Stepping up the score this time around while
still evoking the subtle mournful cues of Ludivico Einaudi’s subtle score for The
Father is renowned Nolan composer Hans Zimmer who fills in Einaudi’s shoes
while unleashing emotional tsunamis of his own.A recurring flashback of father and son on the beach swimming through
the water coupled with Zimmer’s cues washes over you with a sensation that
feels refreshing and cleansing but somehow still terribly sad. By now, Florian Zeller has established himself primarily as
an actor’s director and here veteran actors Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and
Vanessa Kirby practically give blood with their intense performances.With all three characters, we get the sense
they’re professional thinking adults with busy work and separate love lives yet
none of them are sure exactly how to deal with The Son who quickly evolves
into a white elephant in the room.Jackman and Dern share many intense exchanges together and having seen
both actors give explosive performances in 2006 with The Fountain and Inland Empirerespectively it was a joy to finally see these two gifted performers
onscreen together.Anthony Hopkins also
returns though mostly in a glorified cameo as a nasty neglectful father more
interested in career than caring for his family.
Neither The Father nor The Son make for easy
viewings. Clinical, confrontational and
matter of fact about the nature of the human condition and examination of
troubled mental states, both movies are posted to put you in a foul mood while
leaving you drained dry by its sorrowful weathers. Though punishing, they’re also rewarding for
putting a spotlight on commonly faced problems between parents and their
children in younger or older years with a bit of an audiovisual panache. Performances are strong and true across the
board and Zeller’s direction is exhilarating.
Not everyone will be able to digest this with how heavily it sucker
punches you in the gut but as for myself who was struck personally by the road
this film went down, the experience though downbeat was in the end a cleansing
one. Powerful stuff not to be missed!
