movie review the nest 2020

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
• Problemista Link to Problemista
• Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

• Mary & George: Season 1
• Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
• Sugar: Season 1
• American Horror Story: Season 12
• Parish: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Loot: Season 2
• Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
• The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• Palm Royale: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Manhunt: Season 1
• Testament: The Story of Moses: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Steve! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces Link to Steve! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

Best Horror Movies of 2024 Ranked – New Scary Movies to Watch

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Weekend Box Office Results: Godzilla x Kong Scores Monster Debut

The Rotten Tomatoes Channel: Watch on Samsung, Roku, And More

• Trending on RT
• Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
• 3 Body Problem
• Play Movie Trivia

2020, Mystery & thriller/Drama, 1h 47m

What to know

Critics Consensus

An effective pairing of period setting and timeless themes, The Nest wrings additional tension out of its unsettling story with an outstanding pair of lead performances. Read critic reviews

You might also like

Where to watch the nest.

Watch The Nest with a subscription on Netflix, or buy it on Prime Video, Vudu, Apple TV.

Rate And Review

Super Reviewer

Rate this movie

Oof, that was Rotten.

Meh, it passed the time.

It’s good – I’d recommend it.

So Fresh: Absolute Must See!

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Step 2 of 2

How did you buy your ticket?

Let's get your review verified..

AMCTheatres.com or AMC App New

Cinemark Coming Soon

We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future.

Regal Coming Soon

Theater box office or somewhere else

By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie.

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

The nest videos, the nest   photos.

An entrepreneur and his family begin to unravel after moving into an old country manor in England in the 1980s.

Rating: R (Nudity|Language Throughout|Some Sexuality|Teen Partying)

Genre: Mystery & thriller, Drama

Original Language: English (United Kingdom)

Director: Sean Durkin

Producer: Sean Durkin , Rose Garnett , Ed Guiney , Amy Jackson , Christina Piovesan , Derrin Schlesinger

Writer: Sean Durkin

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 18, 2020  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Nov 17, 2020

Box Office (Gross USA): $137.4K

Runtime: 1h 47m

Distributor: IFC Films

Production Co: FilmNation Entertainment, Element Pictures, Elevation Pictures, BBC Films

Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

Cast & Crew

Rory O'Hara

Carrie Coon

Allison O'Hara

Charlie Shotwell

Tanya Allen

Tattiawna Jones

Marcus Cornwall

Wendy Crewson

Allison's Mum

Michael Culkin

Arthur Davis

Adeel Akhtar

Annabel Leventon

Patricia Davis

Peter Hamilton Dyer

Donald Barker

Bamshad Abedi-Amin

Oliver Gatz

Christian Jenner

Stuart McQuarrie

Polly Allen

Kaisa Hammarlund

Andrei Alén

Sean Durkin

Screenwriter

Rose Garnett

Amy Jackson

Christina Piovesan

Derrin Schlesinger

Glen Basner

Executive Producer

Ben Browning

Alison Cohen

Andrew Lowe

Milan Popelka

Jeremy Smith

Polly Stokes

Mátyás Erdély

Cinematographer

Matthew Hannam

Film Editing

Richard Reed Parry

Original Music

News & Interviews for The Nest

Best-Reviewed Movies by Genre 2020

Riz Ahmed Wins Best Actor, Nomadland takes top prize at Gotham Awards

12 Films from Returning Filmmakers to Watch at Sundance

Critic Reviews for The Nest

Audience reviews for the nest.

Law and Coon give two brilliant performances (Law is initially flashier but you can see that he's barely concealing his anguish, while Coon gets to slowly build to her eventual breakdown) and I really like the horror aesthetic being used for this kind of drama.

Movie & TV guides

Play Daily Tomato Movie Trivia

Discover What to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes Podcasts

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘the nest’: film review | sundance 2020.

Playing a couple whose relationship starts to buckle from the strain of a move to England from New York, Jude Law and Carrie Coon star in 'The Nest,' writer-director Sean Durkin's first feature since 'Martha Marcy May Marlene.'

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Contributing Film Critic

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Email
• Show additional share options
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Pinit
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Tumblr
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Print
• Share this article on Comment

If you didn’t know better, you might almost imagine that The Nest , writer-director Sean Durkin ‘s long awaited follow-up to his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), was inspired by a lost Henry James novel. Although it’s set in the mid-1980s, this story about an Anglo American family fraying at the edges after a transatlantic move is a hyper-nuanced study of marriage mind games, cultural misunderstanding and stifling gender expectations.

A beautifully modulated chamber piece, played by a crack ensemble led by Jude Law as a flashy Cockney on the make and Carrie Coon as his increasingly disillusioned American wife (think Portrait of a Lady ‘s Isabel Archer, but chain-smoking and wild in the sack), The Nest lingers long after the final credits. It may not have the same surprising newness that juiced the debut of Martha Marcy , but it casts an ineffable spell nevertheless.

Related Stories

With the departure of its ceo, sundance now must chart a new course, 'ghostbusters: frozen empire' warms up box office with $4.7m in previews.

A key collaborator for Durkin here is Hungarian DP Matyas Erdely, who worked with Durkin on Southcliffe , a limited series set in the U.K. about a town surviving a series of shootings. Known for his cinematography on Laszlo Nemes’ Holocaust drama Son of Saul , composed entirely of close-ups, Erdely devises with Durkin a shot list that follows a rigorous if enigmatic logic, favoring long-distance takes outside and protracted master shots indoors that keep the characters at an inscrutable remove but seemingly cohesive as a group. Once we get to know the characters better, the camera literally gets up close and personal with them even as the family members become isolated from one another, seldom together in the same shot.

When first met, the O’Hara clan looks like a Ralph Lauren double-page spread come to life. While dashing English-import Rory (Law) brings home bacon from Wall Street, his wife Allison (Coon) runs a riding school near their suburban home. Her smart-mouthed but basically sweet teenage daughter Sam (Oona Roche, from The Morning Show ) from a previous marriage has a warm relationship both with Allison and her stepfather, and even gets on well with her little half-brother Benjamin (in demand 12-year-old Charlie Shotwell, Captain Fantastic ).

When Rory comes home one day and tells Allison that the Manhattan financial scene is in a slump and he has a great opportunity to build something from the ground up if they move to London, she’s decidedly unsure, especially since Rory doesn’t have any family back home to help them get settled in. But even her own mother (Wendy Crewson) is of the opinion that the reason a woman gets married is so she doesn’t have to make decisions anymore.

With little more than a dissolve cut to mark the shift, the move is made and Allison and the kids pull up in a taxi at their new home, a sprawling 19th century neo-Gothic mansion in the Surrey countryside with lofty high ceilings and acres of surrounding land. Having shipped Allison’s beloved black thoroughbred stallion Richmond over from America, they hire builders to construct a stable and practice arena while the kids get settled at new schools.

However, despite his impressive bullshitting skills, Rory is not the whiz kid he makes himself out to be. The much-touted new opportunity in London effectively depends on his being able to persuade his old boss Arthur (a splendidly splenetic Michael Culkin) into accepting a buyout from an American company for which Rory would get a finder’s fee. When that falls through, the bills stop getting paid, and Allison is forced to become the first farmhand in the South Downs to own a chinchilla coat. Sam falls in with some wilder local kids from the area (“Let’s get some speed!” is arguably the most authentically ’80s youth-speak in the movie), and poor lonely Ben is being bullied at school. Even Richmond is failing to thrive in his new paddock.

Durkin writes in the film’s press notes that the film was partly inspired by his own experience of transatlantic living as a kid in the ’80s and ’90s and how struck he was at the time by the vast cultural differences between the two places, a gap much narrowed today. The film’s spooky editing rhythms and Erdely’s masterful use of penumbral back lighting enhance that disjointed, out-of-kilter feeling. Meanwhile, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry’s string-led soundtrack adds a spaced-out melancholy vibe that’s both classy and faintly menacing, and represents an interesting contrast to the choice cuts of vintage mid-’80s Britpop, including early tracks by The Cure, Bronski Beat and the Thompson Twins.

Just as musical in its way is the orchestration of the performances, which start out quiet, pastoral and piping and become an operatic, ferocious din. This is especially true during a climactic sequence that sees Sam throwing a party at the house while Allison and Rory’s marriage approaches a breaking point at a fancy restaurant with clients and Rory’s affable colleague Steve (Adeel Akhtar). Coon, in particular, displays some of that phenomenal range that those familiar with her work on HBO’s The Leftovers  and on stage with the Steppenwolf theater company have come to know. Durkin really lets her rip here with shots that just hold on her face as emotions flicker past like fast scuttling clouds and sequences where she gets to show off a physicality that’s mesmerizing without any dialogue. Law, in excellent form here, nevertheless seems sometimes eclipsed by Coon until he gets a powerful if somewhat on-the-nose scene with Anne Reid as his hard-as-brass mother.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)   Production: A Filmnation Entertainment, BBC Films presentation with the participation of Telefilm Canada of an Element Pictures production in association with Elevation Pictures, Substitute Films Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche, Adeel Akhtar, Wendy Crewson, Anne Reid, Michael Culkin, James Nelson-Joyce Director-screenwriter: Sean Durkin Producers: Ed Guiney, Derrin Schlesinger, Rose Garnett, Sean Durkin, Amy Jackson, Christina Piovesan Executive producers:  Andrew Lowe, Polly Stokes, Jude Law, Ben Browning, Glen Basner, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka Director of photography: Matyas Erdely Production designer: James Price Costume designer: Matthew Price Editor: Matthew Hannam Music: Richard Reed Parry Music supervisor: Lucy Bright Casting: Shaheen Baig, Susan Shopmaker Sales: FilmNation, UTA

No rating, 107 minutes

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Colin farrell on rise of irish actors in hollywood: “we punch so far above our weight”, zoe saldaña says she expects marvel’s ‘guardians of the galaxy’ will return: “it’d be a huge loss”, netflix enters its dan lin era, benedict cumberbatch, olivia colman to star in ‘war of the roses’ remake for searchlight, ‘the lost boys’ co-screenwriter says warner bros. wanted “brutal” rewrites to peter pan-inspired script, shakira says she and her sons found ‘barbie’ “emasculating”.

Review: In ‘The Nest,’ Jude Law and Carrie Coon give us an unnerving anatomy of a marriage

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

The Los Angeles Times is committed to reviewing new theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries inherent risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. We will continue to note the various ways readers can see each new film, including drive-in theaters in the Southland and VOD/streaming options when available.

“The Nest,” Sean Durkin’s beautifully chilled second feature, opens on a house in a 1986 New York suburb, with two cars in the driveway, a pool in the backyard and a faint breeze rustling the foliage. It’s the dawn of a new morning for Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), who peers distractedly out the window as he makes a phone call, one that will upend the seemingly contented, comfortable life he’s built for himself and his family. Is that dissatisfaction we see in his face as he surveys his surroundings? Or is it anxiety, even desperation — an awareness that even when he doesn’t have nearly enough, it could all be taken away from him in an instant?

As Law’s performance shrewdly suggests, the answer lies somewhere in between. Within moments, Rory springs an idea on his wife, Allison (a brilliant Carrie Coon), that turns out to be a done deal: They’re moving to the U.K., where Rory grew up, and where he plans to seize a lucrative new opportunity at a London trading firm. Allison is slow to come around, but come around she always does; this is the family’s fourth move in a decade and by far their most drastic. That becomes clear when Rory gives his wife and their two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), a tour of the manor house he’s rented in the Surrey countryside, complete with 17th century woodwork and a stable where Allison, a riding instructor, can keep her horse.

You know what they say about something that looks too good to be true, and that might even be overstating things in the case of the O’Haras’ new home, a sparsely furnished cavern of a house that suggests the backdrop of a domestic horror movie. And in a way, that’s precisely what it is. No jump scares are pending, fortunately, though the measured rhythms of Matthew Hannam’s editing and the brooding dissonances of Richard Reed Parry’s score might lead you to suspect otherwise. The gorgeously shadowy images accentuate the story’s narrative resemblance to “The Shining,” even borrowing a few of Stanley Kubrick’s gliding camera moves and symmetrical compositions. (The picture was shot on 35-millimeter film by Mátyás Erdely, the Hungarian cinematographer known for his bravura work on László Nemes’ “Son of Saul” and “Sunset.” )

Durkin’s formal smarts were already apparent from his brilliantly destabilizing 2011 debut feature, “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which used eerie imprecisions of time, narrative and geography to suggest the irreparable splintering of a young woman’s psyche. The antagonist in that movie — apart from perhaps Martha, Marcy May or Marlene herself — was nonetheless readily identifiable as a murderous sex cult, a malevolent external force. Physical violence was also the primary threat in the 2013 British miniseries Durkin directed, “Southcliffe,” a multithreaded crime drama set in motion by a deadly shooter’s senseless rampage.

Although it flirts with the conventions of cinematic horror, “The Nest” is a drier, subtler exercise in creeping dread. Its refusal to give concrete definition to the menace at hand, which will surely be a source of frustration for some, is also a sign of Durkin’s growing confidence. He attends to the details of his characters’ home life and their ’80s milieu with such matter-of-fact specificity — the longish haircuts, the slightly oversized fashions, the snatches of Heart, New Order and the Psychedelic Furs on the soundtrack — that you may not fully see the emotional abyss he has quietly opened beneath them.

And despite the compressed time frame, the O’Haras have been sitting astride that abyss a while. You sense it immediately in the sibling solidarity that binds Samantha and Benjamin, the alliance they’ve quietly struck against the ever-looming specter of their parents’ unhappiness. And you feel it in every interaction between Rory and Allison, whose tender moments and still-passionate sex life conceal deep stress fractures, worn down by unending patterns of doubt and distrust.

On the one hand, the impending collapse of their finances and their marriage is clearly Rory’s fault: He’s a reckless spender and an unreliable provider, and his need to seem rich and cultured in front of his associates goes hand-in-hand with a string of disastrous business decisions. In a recent MEL Magazine essay , the critic Tim Grierson noted that Law, a gifted actor who was perhaps prematurely sold to the public as a movie star, seems almost too ideally cast these days as scoundrels and strivers — men who are “either humbled or indignant because their lives didn’t exactly work out.” His wrenching performance here feels like a furious rejection, and thus an inevitable confirmation, of that assessment.

“You’re exhausting,” Allison tells Rory, and indeed he is, like Icarus and Sisyphus rolled into one. She’s made of tougher stuff, whether she’s secretly hoarding cash to pay the household bills, dealing with Benjamin’s anxieties and Samantha’s moods, or tending to her ailing horse, whose sudden decline sounds a blunt but effective note of symbolic foreboding. But if we are lured more readily to Allison’s side, the movie doesn’t entirely absolve her of her responsibility, her own willingness to suspend her better judgment and deny the truth about the feckless man she married. Coon gives us a minutely detailed study in slow-motion disillusionment: Watch her expression almost imperceptibly darken at one of Rory’s swanky work functions, when she silently absorbs the latest of his many lies; some weeks later, at another dinner with his colleagues, she’s in no mood to maintain the charade.

It’s no accident that their tensions seem to flare most openly in public, at events whose stiff formality brings out a defiant bluntness, even blowsiness, in Allison. Their tensions may be rooted, abstractly, in the materialist greed and prescribed gender roles of their particular decade, but they are also born of differences in class and culture. You can picture their fairy-tale romance before it went sour; she was swept off her feet by a dashing Brit and he fell hard for “a beautiful blond American girl.” He utters those words in the movie’s most revelatory scene (featuring a dark, chiseled gem of a performance from Anne Reid), in which Rory peers into the shadows of his own unhappy childhood and finds a cold, indifferent void staring back at him.

At times it seems that void will swallow “The Nest,” which is borne along on such forceful undercurrents of rage, insecurity and despair that it seems destined to spiral toward tragedy. I’ll say no more, except to note that what makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin. The last shot pointedly answers the first one, with the dawn of another morning: Nothing has been resolved but everything has been laid bare. Whether that strikes you as horrific or oddly hopeful, it feels awfully close to home.

Rated: R, for language throughout, some sexuality, nudity and teen partying Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes Playing: Starts Sept. 18, Vineland Drive-in, City of Industry; the Frida Cinema, Santa Ana; Regency Directors Cut Cinema at Rancho Niguel, Laguna Niguel; and in general release where theaters are open

More to Read

If you like your sci-fi nightmares smart and socially aware, get into ‘The Kitchen’

Jan. 11, 2024

How ‘All of Us Strangers’ takes grief and loss and channels them into healing

Jan. 9, 2024

As ghostly parents, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy correct the past in ‘All of Us Strangers’

Jan. 2, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Barbara Rush, ‘It Came From Outer Space’ and ‘Peyton Place’ actor, dies at 97

April 1, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ smashes its way to $80 million. How it won the box office

March 31, 2024

The movies went soft on AI. ‘The Matrix’ reminds us why it’s so dangerous

Review: In ‘Wicked Little Letters,’ the shock value feels about a century too late

March 30, 2024