The Son Review

After The Father, which used form to put an audience inside a failing mind, Florian Zeller turns to adolescent depression and treats it as a problem of scheduling. Nicholas is sad. He stops going to school. His father moves him in, buys him a desk, tells him things will improve, and the film mistakes this sequence of domestic arrangements for insight.

Zen McGrath is asked to play an illness rather than a person, and the direction pushes him toward a stiff, declamatory grief that never sounds like a seventeen year old. Jackman is stronger, above all in the scene where Peter visits his own father and Anthony Hopkins, on screen for maybe eight minutes, opens a hole under the picture with pure contempt.

Those minutes understand something about inherited damage that the surrounding two hours do not. Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby are both stranded playing reasonable women who react. The photography is clean and expensive and wholly uninterested in how the boy sees anything. Worst is the last movement, which stages the death, hands you a scene of the boy grown and well, then withdraws it, using the audience's relief as a trapdoor.