There’s a lot to unpack in THE SON.
Adapted by Academy Award winners Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s acclaimed stage play, THE SON sees aspiring politician Peter’s busy life with new partner Beth and their baby thrown into disarray when his ex‐wife Kate turns up with their troubled and distant teenage son, Nicholas, setting the family on a dangerous path, changing the course of their lives forever.
Nicholas is the 17-year-old child of a divorce that is amicable on the surface, but remains raw, especially for his mother, Kate. Nicholas has been wagging school. Nicholas and his parents agree it is best that he moves in with his father, hoping that spending time with Peter and a new school will enable him to come through the depression and despair the distant divorce has generated.
Peter and Beth provide what security and encouragement they can, but then Nicholas’s problems threaten to come between the new couple and bring up demons from Peter’s own past. Beth, for her part, feels torn by her conflicting responsibilities: loyalty to Peter, caring for baby Theo, and supporting a troubled teenager she barely knows.
Meanwhile, Nicholas finds hope impossible to grasp, only momentarily holding onto pockets of refuge in his childhood memories.
When Nicholas’s depression deepens, suicide looks like salvation, an attempt leading to his hospitalization in a psychiatric ward.
Faced with clear advice from the psychiatric doctor and the impassioned pleading of Nicholas for them to take him home to Peter’s apartment, Peter and Kate make a decision that will haunt them forever.
In Peter’s desperation to be a good father to Nicholas, we discover that he too is the son, the only son of an unloving father, a father he so desperately wants to be the antithesis of.
THE SON blows apart the Brady Bunch bullshit of the happy ever-aftering blended family.
The script and direction is impeccable and each and every member of this ensemble cast is terrific. Hugh Jackman as Peter, Vanessa Kirby as Beth, Laura Dern as Kate, Zen McGrath as Nicholas, and the electrifying Anthony Hopkins as Peter’s patriarchal father, who in one scene stealing sequence just about steals the show.
Too good for Oscar, see THE SON. It rises well above other box office offerings of late.