The Father, Florian Zeller’s feature debut, was a truly immersive masterpiece, offering viewers the opportunity to experience madness from within, through the character of an old man who is losing his bearings, brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins. His clever staging transformed a London apartment into a maze of mirrors, reflecting the duplication and wanderings of the protagonist’s thought.
Unfortunately, apart from a pronounced taste for pessimism and a sustained attention to details that may seem trivial, The son (VF of The Son), his second try, has little in common with his predecessor. Still, it’s hard not to compare the two films, which are set in the same universe—Hopkins even making a brief appearance—and both deal with different aspects of mental health.
While Zeller brilliantly decoded the intricacies of a wavering mind in his first essay, he struggled to convince in the second, in particular because he chose to adopt the point of view of those who suffer collaterally from a loved one with mental illness. Rather than trying to demystify the incomprehensible, he prefers to film denial and impotence, multiplying tragic and heartbreaking scenes, often to the detriment of common sense and benevolence.
Peter (Hugh Jackman) has it all. A flourishing career, a beautiful apartment in the heart of Manhattan, a young wife (Vanessa Kirby) with whom he is madly in love and a brand new baby. However, reality catches up with him when his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), knocks on his door telling him that their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is not well, has not shown up to class since. almost a month and asks to live with his father.
Convinced that his son is slowly climbing the slope, Peter finds it difficult to understand that he does not have the necessary tools to help him keep his head above water and get out of the severe depression from which he suffers, too caught up in his job and the moral dilemmas that force him to confront his own rocky relationship with his father.
We quickly understand that what the director wants is first of all to take account of the difficulty of communicating, of parental impotence, of the fictions that relatives tell each other so as not to sink, of the blindness that sets itself up quickly become an insurmountable barrier, emotional deficiencies that prevent us from responding adequately to the suffering of others.
That parents are distraught in the face of a diagnosis of depression? Yes. But that they are stunned to the point of knowing nothing about the symptoms, signs and available resources? That they go on with their lives not realizing that their son has been skipping school for weeks? Less believable. Especially since with actors of the caliber of Laura Dern and Hugh Jackman, the filmmaker would not have needed these exaggerations — and a few tearful flashbacks — to explain the denial, the suffering, the feeling of failure, taking some of the weight off the shoulders of a teenager crying out for help.