The torments of a child – Newspaper Kommersant No. 33 (7478) of 02/22/2023

Released this week is Florian Zeller’s The Son, the sequel to the French playwright-turned-filmmaker’s trilogy about family. The first of this trilogy was “Father” (2020), where the main role was played by Anthony Hopkins, who received an Oscar for it. In The Son, where Hopkins appears in a different role, Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby also played, but the talented cast does not save the picture from flat manipulativeness, believes Yulia Shagelman.

For films based on plays (and both of Zeller’s films are based on his own plays, which were successfully staged in many countries of the world, including Russia), there is always a danger of turning into a TV show. Surprisingly, Zeller managed to avoid this effect in “Father”, although his events did unfold for the most part in one London apartment, and all attention was focused on Hopkins’ hero, who bore the same name as the actor. However, in fact, the scene of action was the consciousness of Anthony, before our eyes, fading from dementia, and this terrible process was demonstrated on the screen by purely cinematic methods: almost imperceptible changes in the interior, slight distortion of lighting from scene to scene, delicate work with off-screen music. Add to this the unreliability of absolutely all the narrators, starting with the main one, and the film, which pretended to be a family drama, turned into almost a horror about the slow and irreversible death of the mind.

“Son” is arranged much simpler and more straightforward. And despite the fact that several places of action change here, the characters go out into the street, travel from New York to Washington, and in their memories they are transferred to the Mediterranean coast, the whole film does not leave a feeling of closeness, isolation and artificiality of the space, as well as those played out in it. passions. The topics here are considered almost the same as in “Father”, and they are, as they say, trigger ones: misunderstanding between generations, mental disorders, parental concerns for children and feelings of guilt towards them, insufficient compliance with one’s responsible role. They are quite capable of putting pressure on the audience’s emotions, especially since everything develops according to the canons that have been tested for centuries (if a gun is mentioned on the stage, it will, of course, fire, although we don’t even see it), but this happens rather despite the efforts of the actors and the author.

Ironically, the main character of the film, despite its title, again becomes the father, however, much younger and more active than in the previous picture. Peter (Jackman), a successful lawyer, lives with his young wife Beth (Kirby) and newborn son in Manhattan, in a stylish apartment that looks like an outback illustration from an interior magazine. Despite the fact that in the future there will be repeated reproaches that Peter’s top priority is his work, he seems to be quite a caring husband and dad until his ex-wife Kate (Dern) appears on his doorstep. She reports that something is wrong with their son, 17-year-old Nicholas (Zan McGrath): it turns out that he has not gone to school for a month, he has been lying to his mother all this time and generally behaves strangely. Peter, who, apparently, did not pay much attention to the boy after the divorce, actively turns on: he agrees that Nicholas moves in with him, finds him a new school and, it seems, is going to correct all his mistakes at once.

It is clear that in real life situations where parents do not notice the problems of their children until it is too late, unfortunately, are not uncommon. It is not clear why exactly these characters found themselves in such a situation – non-poor and well-educated residents of a modern big city, who, in terms of mental health, should have held completely non-healing views. Nicholas demonstrates with all his appearance that he has severe depression, and more than once pronounces the symptoms in plain text, or even screams about them, but Peter continues to believe that everything is going according to his plan and is about to get better.

Zeller is somehow trying to get this blindness out of Peter’s problems with his own father (Hopkins, in a more familiar form than in “Father”, the hypostasis of a scoundrel hypnotizing with his presence, appears in one scene, but with his own game he gives this scene an incredible specific weight). But for Kate, he didn’t even come up with such an explanation, and all Dern’s attempts to fashion her heroine from the void are in vain. Also, the director does not allow the audience to look into the soul of Nicholas, because he does not seem to want to do it himself. He even speaks not like a living teenager, but like a character from some educational brochure lying around in the corridor of the clinic. And his illness becomes on the screen nothing more than a formal dramatic device, almost insulting to those who actually experienced such pain.