“He needs you, Peter,” his ex-wife tells him. “You can’t just abandon him.” The words are chosen carefully, for maximum effect; Peter (Hugh Jackman) did, in fact, abandon his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) and their teenage son Nicholas (Zen McGrath). Now he has a new wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and a new baby. But Nicholas hasn’t been to school in almost a month, and Kate can’t reach him. “I don’t understand where this sadness comes from,” she says. “Well, he’s a teenager,” Peter replies, which doesn’t quite explain it.
These four people are the central characters of The Son, the new film from Florian Zeller, who also wrote and directed The Father two years ago (insert The Holy Spirit joke here). Early on, it appears that Nicholas is the title character; he suffers from acute depression, and Peter doesn’t have much more luck than Kate, at least initially; he gives him platitudes, and warnings of the consequences of not going to school, and plays the role of the stern father. “I can’t deal with any of it,” Nicholas explains. “I want something to change, but I don’t know what.” Maybe the change is his surroundings, so he goes to live with Peter and Beth and the new baby for a while – which, understandably, creates some tension between husband and wife, as well as stepmother and stepson.
But the more time we spend with these characters, the more we understand that the key to Peter’s strained relationship with his son is his own relationship with his father (played by The Father star Anthony Hopkins, in one brief and chilling scene). The stilted formality of their interactions is painful; the way Peter’s father laughs, outright, at his son’s attempt at “moral superiority” is worse. He clocks him, perhaps accurately, for announcing himself as a better father than his own, but privately, particularly in this challenging time, he realizes he’s becoming the father he always hated.
Peter is not an easy role, and Jackman occasionally delivers a false beat or awkward line reading. But his understanding of the character is sharp as a tack; he’s spent, it seems, much of his life keeping himself at a safe, optimistic distance (“Everything will be fine,” he keeps insisting), and when that doesn’t work, he embarks on poorly calculated bouts of tough love and hard-edged disciplinarian aggression. It’s not easy to put across desperation as a character without seeming desperate as an actor, but Jackman does it, and he has one moment here, explaining a dire turn of events to his ex-wife and absolutely falling apart, that is heart-wrenching.
Zeller works in a cool, sleek style, dwelling on the shiny surfaces and upscale lives of his protagonists, as they become aware that there are certain problems you cannot just throw money at. “I try every day with all my strength,” Nicholas struggles to explain. “I’m in pain all the time. And I’m tired, I’m tired of being in pain.” He states this flatly, simply, and most of the big moments in The Son are like that; this is a low-volume movie, where voices are rarely raised, and everyone tries to accommodate, to not make a big deal. (It rings false only when bucking that instinct – there’s one awful moment where Nicholas overhears a conversation that it’s hard to believe his father and stepmother would have, right then and there).
The Son isn’t as innovative as The Father, which ingeniously replicated the disassociation and confusion of its protagonist by telling its story from his perspective. But Zellner effectively uses sound and image to convey the depths of his despair, the low rumbling of depression in all of his interactions, and Hans Zimmer’s score is subtle and effective. One should be clear: this is a difficult film, about difficult subjects, and even its short-lived bursts of happiness and connection mostly serve to remind us how quickly those moments can end. 
