The Son Parent Guide

High powered lawyer Peter (Hugh Jackman) is on top of the world. Literally - his gleaming office has floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the Empire State Building. His beautiful wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby) has recently had a baby boy and life couldn’t be better. Then Peter’s ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) shows up with bad news: their 17-year-old son has been skipping school for a month and his moods are so intense that Kate is frightened of him.

Peter is appropriately concerned and has a chat with Nicholas (Zen McGrath) who insists that he’s just feeling weighed down by life and that he’ll improve if he can live with his dad. Peter agrees, and Nicholas moves in on a tide of buoyant optimism. What Peter doesn’t realize is that Nicholas is seriously mentally ill and a change in residence is not going to solve his problems.

It should come as no surprise that a movie about depression should be so, well, depressing, but I did not expect the tsunami of sadness that pours off the screen, mixed in with huge amounts of parental guilt. This is not a movie for the faint of heart. Seriously. If you worry about your kids or are concerned about your own parental inadequacies, don’t watch this film. You’ll never sleep again.

Much of the story feels like a giant guilt festival for Peter. Nicholas tells his dad that his depression stems from a sense of abandonment during the divorce. Kate reminds him of how much she loved him and how happy they were together. Beth is frustrated that he puts in such long hours at work, leaving her alone with baby Theo. But the most powerful guilt delivery system is Peter’s own mind: he is incapable of detaching himself from Nicholas’s illness and seeing it as anything other than a manifestation of his paternal failures.

If watching someone endure constant stress and self-reproach is your idea of entertainment, then The Son is the movie for you. I’m not sure who else is going to want to watch it. There are other movies about adolescent mental illness that spend less time beating up parents and give a more insightful look at the emotional landscape of the affected teens. True, this film has outstanding performances by its adult cast (Zen McGrath is a bit wobbly as Nicholas) but not even Hugh Jackman’s harrowing performance as Peter is enough to make me sit through two hours of heartache and a frustrating final scene again.

If you are still considering The Son for prime time viewing, you will want to bear in mind that suicide is a major theme of the film, with two off screen attempts. A teen is also seen with scars and fresh knife cuts on his arm, and a knife is found in his bed. This film doesn’t sugar coat mental illness but it doesn’t really do a great job of depicting it either. Given that Florian Zeller is a talented director, this movie is a disappointment. Frankly, if you want a film with intense family dynamics and a standout cast, you should watch his earlier film The Father. Now, that’s a film that feels unsettling real.