Certificate: 15 (mental health theme, suicide, self-harm). Running Time: 123 mins. UK Distributor: Black Bear Pictures
WHO’S IN IT?
Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Hugh Quarshie, Anthony Hopkins, George Cobell
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Florian Zeller (director, writer, producer), Christopher Hampton (writer), Iain Canning, Karl Hartman, Joanna Laurie, Emile Sherman and Christophe Spadone (producers), Hans Zimmer (composer), Ben Smithard (cinematographer), Yorgos Lamprinos (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A successful businessman (Jackman) deals with the concerning behaviour of his teenage son (McGrath)…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE SON? (TW // REFERENCES TO MENTAL HEALTH AND SELF-HARM)
It’s hard to articulate through writing just how terribly misguided The Son is – but I’ll give it a try anyway.
Even though it comes from the same creative team behind the Oscar-winning drama The Father, including director and co-writer Florian Zeller (adapting another one of his own plays for the screen), and features a cast of great actors like Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, and even The Father’s headliner Anthony Hopkins (albeit in a much smaller role this time round), this is a film that feels like it was written, made, and in some cases performed as though it were a GCSE drama piece, with a profoundly ignorant view of some very serious topics that you can’t believe made it into a film of this calibre, let alone one that’s clearly been designed to nab some awards.
The son of the title is Nicholas (Zen McGrath), the teenage offspring of divorced parents Peter (Jackman) and Kate (Dern). He clearly hasn’t taken their separation well, because he’s been skipping school and acting hostile towards his mother, prompting him to go across town and live with his father, his new wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their infant son for a short while until he gets back on his feet. However, he just can’t seem to shake his low state of mind, ultimately reaching a point that he cannot seem to come back from, with devastating consequences.
On paper, this sounds like an ideal drama. It suggests that, much like how The Father put the audience firmly in the mind of someone with dementia, it dives right into how a young person with severe mental health issues thinks and acts when they’re in this deeply troubled state, and how the world around them is adjusted, along with the people in their life, to fit their declining state of mind, revealing a devastating portrait of illness that actually gets to the heart of its long-term effects.
Except, it’s none of those things. In fact, The Son is barely even about the son himself; it’s much more about how the parents, particularly Jackman’s Peter, react to their child’s increasingly concerning behaviour with never-ending confusion as to why he may be acting this way, as though the concept of depressive mental health was an entirely new phenomenon to them. We spend far more time with Peter than we do Nicholas, with even Dern’s less prominent Kate having a greater presence, leaving the one character who we perhaps should be spending the most time with all but side-lined. Nicholas isn’t so much a character as he is a living and breathing collection of tropes most associated with the angsty, moody teen archetype, written by Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton as having zero personality or even anything remotely human, other than the fact that he’s very, very sad a lot of the time and wants everyone to know about it. Sadly, he’s also performed just as lifelessly, as Zen McGrath delivers a one-note turn where he is directed to blankly stare into the void in the hopes that this will somehow convey inner torture, but it makes him seem like someone who shouldn’t be left alone with sharp objects and dangerous weapons, regardless of his mental health.
Speaking of which, this film is bizarrely clueless when it comes to depicting or even discussing these serious matters, as though the writers found out mere moments before writing what depression actually was, and then did absolutely no further research into it. At no point do the adult characters ever have an intellectual conversation about the clear-as-day symptoms that young Nicholas is projecting (from showing cuts on his arm to expressing out loud his general unhappiness), except to say how much he scares them or simply isn’t right in the head, which suggests a level of ignorance that barely seems plausible. It’s one thing if either Peter or Kate or even Kirby’s Beth are neglectful guardians who are blissfully unaware of how this teen is really feeling, but it genuinely comes across like none of them have ever heard of mental illness before in their lives, because the writing so poorly mistakes their genuine stupidity for harmless naivety, which makes it hard to believe that these people are capable of raising a child if they can’t even identify the warning signs that maybe, just maybe, this kid needs serious psychological help, or at the very least medication that can provide some short-term relief (something which, as I mentioned during my previous review for this film, does not seem to exist in this universe).
Even with all of that being said, nothing will prepare you for how shockingly ill-judged and executed the conclusion of this movie is. It features characters making a major decision that is the absolute worst thing to do in this particular situation, and within minutes it blows up right in their faces, leading to a final scene that is not only telegraphed the minute things kick off, but is executed in such a manipulative and cloying manner that it’ll make you want to apologise to The Whale for harshly judging its own, similarly melancholic ending. It’s a final act that I can envision actively infuriating a great load of people, especially those who have gone through their own bouts with mental health, because the movie treats it in such a mindlessly ignorant fashion, with nothing to say because it really does seem like it doesn’t know anything about it, that it feels rather offensive. I myself have experienced difficulties with mental illness, and found myself physically struggling to get through this movie, since it shows people reacting to it in all the ways that you really shouldn’t, and portrays anyone who offers legitimately sound medical advice as the boo-hiss villain who just wants to keep families apart; after all, who needs science when you have emotion? That’s what The Son seems to think, it seems.
Again, it’s hard to fathom that such a monumentally tone-deaf film could come from the makers of a genuinely fantastic psychological drama like The Father, waste some truly strong performances by the likes of Hugh Jackman, and get everything about mental health so wrong that it barely seems real. What on earth were they thinking?!
SO, TO SUM UP…
The Son is a horrendously tone-deaf attempt to depict teenage mental health, but comes across as so ignorant and ill-judged in its efforts that it feels dangerously offensive to anyone who’s gone through it themselves.
