The Son

Venice Film Festival #25 – PalaBiennale

Zeller has fumbled his 2nd feature adapted from one of his plays with this hollow and unrealistic screenplay. As a portrayal of mental illness and how that affects not only the person suffering from it, but also the people around them, this was incredibly clumsy and misguided. The film plays out exactly how you expect, once the Chekov’s gun is revealed it’s simply you just waiting for that moment to happen. The film is more interested in emotional manipulation than telling a complex story that actual grapples with the complexities that come with depression. Moreover, ending is a microcosm of this fact. It’s played for gasps, despite being entirely predictable, but that in itself is a gross misuse of mental illness and playing it for shock value feels disingenuous to the topic it’s trying to show sympathy towards.

What really surprised me were the performances. Across the board the performances were a disappointment. Sadly, Hugh Jackman doesn’t shine as bright in the lead role, he’s not awful but it feels very preachy and not as authentic as a role like this requires. Vanessa Kirby is fine, but she’s given practically nothing to work with. Much the same can be said about Laura Dern, who despite her important role on the surface, she’s really wasted here, and in the scenes, she gets she feels wooden and less emotional than the dialogue would suggest. The biggest problem sadly is Zen McGrath. He doesn’t work in this film, the huge overacting he does feels like it belongs on the stage and not alongside the more cinematic performances in the film. The result is this disconnect between all the actors that makes a lot of the scenes feel incredibly forced and staged. When Anthony Hopkins shows up, he blows everyone away and weakens the other performances.

Despite it being about depression, the film lacks an understanding or sympathy towards it and uses it as a plot device. It feels like a pale imitation of other films that tackle this subject matter, like it tried to hit all the points a film like this is meant to hit but didn’t try to inject any emotion or connection to it. It will surely garner some emotional reactions, simply due to the end, but on a cinematic level this was verging on bad. The writing is shocking throughout, it doesn’t feel realistic at all, and it’s flat out bad in these emotional scenes. The scene in the hospital is written completely for plot and isn’t how it would play out in reality. The son is also written is such a bad way as he’s given no characteristics, he is his depression, which makes it hard to connect emotionally to him. From writing to directing to the overall production value, this felt staged and bland