123 min | PG-13 | January 20, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
A successful lawyer takes in his depressed teenage son and decides that love and good intentions will be enough to save him. Florian Zeller stages a mental illness as a debate between two well-dressed adults. The result lectures where it means to devastate.
Peter is a successful Manhattan lawyer who has built a clean second life with a new wife and an infant son. His teenage son Nicholas, from his first marriage, is drowning in depression and stops going to school. Nicholas asks to move in with his father. The film follows Peter as he tries to fix a child he does not understand and cannot reach. Florian Zeller wants to make a film about the limits of parental love. He makes a film about a man who keeps choosing his own comfort and calls it concern.
Hugh Jackman plays Peter with raw commitment and almost no calibration. He weeps, pleads, and rages, and the script gives him only one register to do it in. Zen McGrath plays Nicholas as a sullen blank, and the performance reads as withholding rather than wounded. Vanessa Kirby plays Beth, the new wife, as the reasonable adult nobody listens to, and she does the most with the least. Laura Dern plays Kate, the ex-wife, with brittle exhaustion in her few scenes. Anthony Hopkins appears once as Peter’s father Anthony, and his single cold monologue exposes how flat everything around it plays.
Zeller directs from a script he wrote with Christopher Hampton, adapting his own stage play. The dialogue announces every feeling out loud, and the staging keeps actors facing each other in tasteful apartments that never feel lived in. Hans Zimmer’s score swells underneath the grief and tells the audience how to feel before the actors earn it. A recurring image of a spinning washing machine strains to carry symbolic weight the film has not built. The visual language stays handsome and inert.
The Father turned dementia into a structure the audience experienced from the inside. The Son flattens depression into a problem two adults argue about across a kitchen table. Zeller treats a clinical illness as a moral test for the parents and stacks the drama toward a manipulative final act. The film mistakes volume for depth and tears for truth. It wants to devastate, and it only lectures.