The Son (Venice Film Festival 2022 Review)

The Son (2022) is a layered tale on depression’s corrosive effect, generational trauma, and parental struggles.

Movies are above all else: experiences. They hold up a mirror to either our lives or what we wished our lives could be. They’re a fundamental and formative part of who we are, as collective and as individuals.

They can be experiences elation, sheer terror, overwhelming sadness, pure excitement, laugh inducing, anything & everything in between. But there is one kind of experience that is rare. It comes once a year, if we’re lucky, and they have us see ourselves on screen with brutal honesty, resulting in the rarest of experiences: a therapeutic experience. The Son did that for me.

Easily the most harrowing watch of the entire Venice Film Festival. Florian Zeller’s following to the award-winning The Father packs an emotional punch with thematic layers rich in emotion. Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is a troubled teenager who secretly resents his father Peter (Hugh Jackman) for abandoning him and his mother years ago. Peter, now living with a new infant and his new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and about to get offered his dream job, is suddenly upended when his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) tells him their son has been missing from school for months and is distant and angry.

Peter strives to take care of Nicholas as he would have liked his own father to have taken care of him while juggling work, his and Beth’s new son, and the offer of his dream position in Washington. However, by reaching for the past to correct its mistakes, he loses sight of how to hold onto Nicholas in the present — tearing apart the family he struggles to reunite.

Where The Father’s single focus was one illustrating the unique perspective of those afflicted by Alzheimer’s, one so rarely seen on screen, which created a terrifying experience of fear, paranoia, and uncertainty where the audience eventually began questioning what was real and what wasn’t, much like the lead character whose condition slowly deteriorates his mental stability and sense of self.

Zeller takes a different approach in The Son: one that allows him to tackle not only the subject matter at hand: the depression Nicholas is afflicted by and represses from his parents, whose devotion to their son offers no solution to his plight.

Zeller’s approach can feel more familiar and somewhat standard, but in its broadness the layers of his storytelling convey much more emotional power than what it may at first seem. It’s not just a story of depression’s effect on those who are victims to the condition, but also one that illustrates the effects of such a debilitating disease on loving parents. Peter and Kate struggle with a lot, like any parent would.

Peter is a high-powered New York executive who is weighing an offer to join a U.S. Senator’s D.C. re-election campaign, but he wants to prioritize building his new family: Beth and their baby, Theo. So when Kate confides in genuine fear for their son, Peter understands his responsibility and assumes his parental role.

Zeller doesn’t portray this as some heroic act despite Peter’s righteous intentions, but a trepidations journey where every step taken is riddled with anxiety as Peter tries to how to be a suitable father to Nicholas, validating and encouraging his son’s good behavior, making friends, and having a social life. This is at least what he believes is happening, in this determination to give Nicholas the parental love and devotion he was never given by his own father, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins); who in his single scene in the movie eviscerates his son and his fatherly efforts, devastating us, and Peter, with a show-stealing performance filled with condescension towards Jackman’s Peter.

This confrontation humbles Peter, who himself represses the resentment toward his father, bringing upon a long-overdue confrontation with Nicholas, who turns out had been lying about attending school, his grades, and even his friends. Many ugly truths come to light from both Peter and Nicholas. Zeller’s direction and script bring to light the corrosive effects of depression, how the resentment that boils inside eventually boils over leading to personal problems, and anxieties turning into ugly attacks on those trying to help us.

The compassionate writing never loses the essential humanity of the characters or their struggles, illustrating genuine effort on all parts. This is a story that understands than in trying to do our best, it doesn’t necessarily wield great results. This is nuanced storytelling balance that would have one believe this is the work of a veteran filmmaker, it’s all the more impressive once we realize this only Zeller’s second feature.

Mental illness is the core driving force of The Son. Gently capturing the pain of parents who see their beloved child so desperately in need of help yet feeling absolutely powerless never to offer it, it’s a story that will certainly resonate with many, as it does with this writer. I myself deal with depression and anxiety. I have had many of the conversations Zeller and his collaborator Christopher Hampton capture with such delicate empathy.

I have heard harsh and compassionate words from my own parents that both Jackman and Dern speak to McGrath when trying to grasp the entirety of the situation. But mental anguish eats us away, it blocks our ability to communicate, to feel seen heard and understood; McGrath captures all the little nuances with great detail and skill, you can see his desperation at every frame, his wanting to scream but doesn’t have the strength to, the motivation, doesn’t find it worth it, it is a delicate and intelligent performance that requires the kindest of directions, which Zeller clearly offered.

What elevates this story is how Zeller courageously portrays Jackman’s Peter, stripping away the good-guy song and dance ideal of him and peeling away the rich layers of man who while successful in career carries such a strong lifelong resentment of his father it has transformed into sheer terror of making the same mistakes with his perturbed son, they’ve made him deeply flawed.

Zeller isn’t afraid of depicting Peter’s mistakes, but also doesn’t hide away his efforts; flashing back every so often to yesteryears when Peter was present in Nicholas’ formative years before the family broke apart. That is not the Peter of the present, an important and very purposeful distinction on Zeller’s part that illustrates just much of this condition can be unpredictable in how it originates. There’s effortless vulnerability in Jackman’s performance and it slowly cracks away his proverbial walls, leading to one gut-wrenching crescendo, that he brings home brilliantly.

Dern herself, with little time on screen, has a distinctly challenging task: a mother torn between her own resentment for the man who tore their family apart, and having to depend on the same man to give desperate help to their troubled son. Heart-aching work by Dern, one that maximizes every little minute on screen.

The Son is ultimately a complex work on how the many people affected by one’s mental condition, never forgiving mistakes, but it also never undoes genuine effort and care. An empathetic depiction of struggle on all fronts; from how a young child’s life and mental state is shaped by nurture and parenting. How parents can only do what they see best to their child, judging as best they can in trying to avoid suffering, being present and trusting the person they mean to protect, and a strong tale of generational trauma where hauntings so thought dormant form our own identities, illustrating the long gestating effects of domestic abuse, and the several forms it takes.

An emotionally charged depiction of the contemporary family’s issues; The Son isn’t afraid of tackling real issues with authenticity, illustrating every character as flawed, layered, sympathetic and emotionally driven at every turn. A portrait on the messiness that is the human condition, and how everyone is affected by the ugly condition that is depression, even if not we’re not the ones suffering from it, its influence touches us all.

The Son’s compassionate storytelling deeply affected me. Zeller’s direction is intimate and tension-filled, giving way to sublime performances as Hugh Jackman delivers his most vulnerable work since Logan. A layered tale on depression’s corrosive effect, generational trauma, and parental struggles.

FINAL GRADE: A-

NEXT: Don’t Worry Darling Review

About The Son

Peter (Hugh Jackman) and Beth (Vanessa Kirby) are euphoric after the birth of their first child. Their little family is about to unexpectedly expand, however, with the arrival of Nicholas (Zen McGrath), Peter’s adolescent son from his previous marriage to Kate (Laura Dern).

Nicholas suffers from severe depression, which manifests in uncontrollable tears, withdrawal from social activities, and worse. It has become too painful for Kate, who has run out of options and hopes that Nicholas’s interest in his new sibling will lift his spirits and prevent him from tumbling headlong back into despair.

The Son played at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.