107 min | R | September 18, 2020 | IFC Films
A British broker moves his American family into a Surrey manor he cannot afford, chasing a deal that will fix everything. The deal never comes. Turns out the haunted house was the marriage all along.
Rory and Allison O’Hara have a good life in 1980s America. Rory is a British commodities broker who chases a bigger deal in London. He uproots his wife and two children to a sprawling Surrey manor he cannot afford. The Nest is not about an old house turning haunted. It is about a marriage built on a man’s lie and the slow realization that the lie was the foundation the whole time.
Jude Law plays Rory as a salesman who has sold himself first. He performs wealth with such conviction that you watch the act crack in real time. Carrie Coon plays Allison as a woman who married the dream and now does the math. Coon turns a restaurant scene into a demolition. She says the quiet things out loud and Law has nowhere left to hide. Charlie Shotwell and Oona Roche play the children who absorb the tension the adults pretend not to feel.
Sean Durkin writes and directs with a control that turns domestic drama into something close to horror. The manor swallows the family in wide static shots that leave huge empty space around each person. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély lights the interiors with cold blue dread and lets the rooms feel too big for the people in them. Richard Reed Parry’s score creeps in like a threat that never quite arrives. Durkin made The Witch’s cousin without a single ghost.
This is a film about the gap between the man you sell and the man you are. Rory keeps promising the deal that fixes everything. The deal never comes because the deal was never the problem. Durkin refuses the easy collapse and the easy reconciliation. He lets the family sit in the wreckage of an ambition that was always a performance and trusts you to recognize it.