Fresh on the heels of his directorial debut The Father, released in 2020 to critical acclaim and a plethora of award nominations (including two major Oscar wins), Florian Zeller delivers The Son. Based on one of his stage plays, Zeller adapts for the screen alongside Christopher Hampton, hoping to strike similar success. Featuring Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Zen McGrath, the stars should all align for another strong play-to-screen adaptation.
Struggling with the divorce of his parents, 17 year old Nicholas' mental health has suffered, and he struggles to find a meaning or purpose as he switches between living arrangments and schools. As his parents desperately try to find a solution to save their son, it feels like a race against time before Nicholas explodes. Covering such sensitive, topical thematic ground, does The Son live up to its predecessor and pay respect to a modern day issue?
Let's jump straight to The Son's most unconquerable failure: its screenplay. Despite being adapted from the same writing team that led The Father, a heartbreaking, heartfelt piece of writing imbued with care and attention, to success, the same cannot be said about The Son: a film that comes across as terribly manipulative, chasing manufactured melodrama over genuine emotion. It is really quite unfathomable that the same team can be responsible for both of these films, the extraordinary success of one being the greatest weakness of another.
Zeller is much more successful not he directing front than the writing, aided by terrific production design (it feels very, very New York) and strong cinematography from Ben Smithard. Framing the drama in a way that suggests he does indeed understand the plight of these characters - even when it is not down on the page - Zeller is certainly passionate about showing the vulnerability and struggle of these characters. The purposely muted colour palette further and stirring score clearly demonstrate that he is able to craft a decent film but this doesn't even get off the ground.
Hugh Jackman takes on the lead role with incredibly rocky results. It's unfortunate that Jackman is the main representative of the writing's poor understanding of teen mental health, landing with some of the clunkiest lines in the text; that said however, Jackman's own delivery can feel awkwardly stilted at times, and is a weak performance by any means - the screenplay cannot take on all the blame. Laura Dern is similarly stranded with unflattering material that underserves her as an actress.
In his first major feature, young Zen McGrath hasn't developed the expertise to salvage such a basically-written and poorly-conceived character, and he cannot bring the depth out of Nicholas that is required. As the film regurgitates predictable phrases, McGrath can do nothing but shout the lines out, and it's never really convincing. In fact, Vanessa Kirby is the only one to come out of this unscathed, but she is entirely underused. She possesses a natural warmth that transcends her one-note character, and she's able to discover a much genuine emotion as possible in spite of it lacking in the actual screenplay.
There's nothing quite as disappointing as watching a film that has everything going for it fail so miserably. A fundamentally flawed and poorly-realised feature that wastes so much potential, The Son is made all the more disappointing by the knowledge that everyone is capable of so much better. A dreadful screenplay whose foundations are so weak that nothing good can come of it, it is all evident from the disappointing performances from a typically reliable set of actors and an emotionally-dry conclusion that should on paper should have every eye in the room filling. It all goes so wrong with The Son, almost definitely this year's most disappointing film.