Review: The Son

The Son
Cert: 15 / 123 mins / Dir. Florian Zeller / Trailer

It's Earnest™-season so here comes Florian Zeller's The Son, a turgidly po-faced, navel-gazing domestic melodrama starring Hugh Jackman as the worst type of Pantomime Business Dad who doesn't know how to set his phone to do-not-disturb for meetings, who pulls sad-faces for two hours because his teenage boy doesn't appear to be coping well with his parents' divorce from a decade earlier.

Laura Dern turns up intermittently to sob into her Martini, Vanessa Kirby pouts around an apartment which thinks it's too good for wallpaper, and Anthony Hopkins phones in just enough of a performance to secure the 'and' in the credits-ranking. Hugh's boy is played by Zen McGrath, setting out his stall here for a tour of the Northern club circuit as a Timothée Chalamet tribute act*¹.

WRONG

This is one hundred and twenty minutes of characters angrily asking each other what's wrong and nobody having the answer. It's depression. The kid has clinical depression. It's no-one's fault and it can't be cured, only treated. There, saved you two hours. To be fair, the film doesn't come up with any magic solutions for all this, not least because there aren't any of course, but in the meanwhile it wallows in knowing that anyway and tormenting members of the audience who can see it a mile off.

The whole thing might be meaningful if it wasn't so offensively average, whilst also apparently refusing to explore the subject it's chosen for itself. Going full-Atonement in the last stretch just isn't good enough. Adapting his own play (again), Florian Zeller is happy to churn out a desaturated Channel 5 weekday afternoon angst-a-thon, and Jackman is happy to take the money for pretending he can do serious films as well. Theirs is the only happiness you'll see here.

And I'm taking points off for the shot where the kid is filmed walking alone the 'wrong way' down a heavily signposted one-way street. That's GCSE film-making.

Beautiful Boy was far better at all this, and at least there was some excitement 'cos of all the skag...

*¹ Oh and Hugh Quarshie turns up as well - that's right, Captain Panaka - as a hospital administrator, and nobody calls him Dr Griffin which means this film doesn't take place in the same continuity as Holby City despite having the obvious opportunity and quite frankly I'm probably more furious about this than I am about the appalling approach to mental health issues (including the very scene which Hugh Quarshie is in, for the record).^{[ BACK ]}

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