Florian Zeller explores teenage depression with Hugh Jackman as a rolled father

As in The FatherFlorian Zeller discusses father-son relationships with The Son. He adapts another of his plays, The son, where a teenager torn between his father and his mother loses his footing to lose his mind. Alongside surprisingly out of place Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby, the young Zen McGrath portrays a borderline teenager who will cross the line.

Negligible

Nicholas, 17, picks up: he hasn’t been going to class for a month. Since his parents’ divorce, he has lived with Kate, his mother (Laura Dern), while his remarried father Peter (Hugh Jackman) has just had a newborn baby by his new wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby). The teenager asks to live in his father’s home. The happy rapprochement of the beginnings hides a deep crisis in Nicholas who skips class again, lies, and shuts himself up in silence, collateral victim of the explosion of a couple.

Nicholas blocks on his sudden change in behavior. He fails to define it, to put into words what he feels when he thinks he knows what escapes him: love, a home, protection. The love lost between his parents is reflected in the love he is convinced he never received. In a paranoid deviance, Nicholas imagines that between the two of them, he was “negligible”. The world is collapsing just when it should make sense, and when the metamorphoses of adolescence are taking shape. Course accident.

The tenant

Nicholas is only affect in the face of a brilliant father and a left mother who seems to have lost her life. Zeller skims over Kate (Laura Dern) to focus on Peter (Hugh Jackman), as he is her son’s role model. Faced with Nicholas’s silence and his pretenses, the spectator is like him taken into the mystery of adolescent depression. The few words that will come out of Nicholas shake Peter and will precipitate the sequel. His last meeting with his own father (Anthony Hopkins) is of a palpable cruelty and creates a filiation with The Father by the actor who plays him.

interior film, The Son also crosses London in an icy photogeny, of steel and lead, the universe of the father. Kate’s apartment is warmer. And what happens to Beth, the new wife and mother, cloistered at her husband’s house waiting for him? She looks like another collateral victim. Peter becomes aware and loses his footing in turn. We think of Polanski in this broken camera where the soul searches for itself as in The tenant. But the subject is closer to James Gray. A terrible guilt sets in, gravitational, which will transform Peter, after his son, forever. The harder the fall will be: overwhelming.

The sheet

Gender : Drama
Director: Florian Zeller
Actors: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath
Country : France / Great Britain
Duration : 2h03
Exit : 1st of March 2023
Distributer : Orange Studio Distribution / UGC Distribution