The Son review: Hugh Jackman drama is ugly, ridiculous and inexplicably terrible

Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Anthony Hopkins co-star in Florian Zeller’s baffling follow-up to the Oscar-winning ‘The Father’

The Son is an ugly, blaring question mark of a film, and inexplicably terrible considering the talent involved. Decades of research and armies of scientists might need to be deployed to figure out what happened here. It’s adapted from the second entry in a “spiritual trilogy” of plays by author and playwright Florian Zeller, alongside The Father and The Mother, each dealing with families assailed by disorders and illnesses. Two years ago, Zeller adapted The Father into a film – it proved to be a delicate and deceptively simple portrait of dementia that featured some of Anthony Hopkins’s finest work as an actor, and won him an Oscar. History will not repeat itself with this one.

The film deals with Nicholas (Zen McGrath), the depressed teenage son of wealthy and divorced parents, Peter (Hugh Jackman) and Kate (Laura Dern). He’s been profoundly unsettled by their separation, and hasn’t been to school in a month. Peter left Kate to marry the younger Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and the couple now have an infant son. Nicholas asks to move in with them. What at first seems like a positive step soon crumbles into his further self-destruction. The adults notice the scars on his arms. He conceals more and more from them. They then spend the rest of the film demanding that Nicholas explain what’s wrong with him, all while he displays the most overt symptoms of a major depressive disorder.

Beyond the cool touch of Ben Smithard’s camerawork and Hopkins’s small role as Peter’s father, The Son shares nothing in common with The Father or its sensitivities. Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton – who’s translated many of Zeller’s French plays into English – write about depression as if it were something they spotted on safari once. A far-away curiosity. A bit of exoticism.

It’s wildly implausible that three adults – even if they’re distracted, upper-class types who could conceivably neglect their children – would have never heard of depression or how it manifests. Peter, Laura, and Beth are presented as flawed if sympathetic figures, yet their cluelessness is laughable. Sometimes it veers on the offensive. They talk of Nicholas – who McGrath plays plainly and unimaginatively as twitchy, monotone, and perpetually on the verge of tears – like he’s a demonic presence in their home, with some untraceable darkness in his eyes that only they can see. It’s a one-note depiction of a complex but common illness, and entirely devoid of empathy.

McGrath’s performance may be stilted but, really, so is everyone’s – even if Dern can steal away a few moments of vulnerability in the largely contextless role of a distressed mother. Jackman reads as exaggeratingly chipper in Peter’s lighter moments, then turns into a real, over-played pietà of a tragic hero when things turn dark.

There are no ill intentions behind The Son, but sometimes stories are so badly judged and naive in their execution that they turn ugly. That becomes especially clear when Zeller’s film reaches its conclusion, one telegraphed so early and with such gracelessness that it’s borderline parodic. Why no one involved clocked its ridiculousness is the real mystery here.

Dir: Florian Zeller. Starring: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Anthony Hopkins. 15, 123 minutes.

‘The Son’ is in cinemas from Friday 17 February