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Florian Zeller ’s “ The Father ” was a searing portrait of a man struggling with dementia. It took us inside his increasingly shaky perception of the world with profound empathy, and Sir Anthony Hopkins ’ performance won an Oscar. He returns to Zeller’s disappointing “ The Son ” for a brief, bracing scene to let us know that the title character in this film is not the troubled teenager but the man who is both father and son. That man is Peter, played here by Hugh Jackman .

That scene, almost a full story in itself, is in sharp contrast to the rest of the film, which is well-intentioned but poorly constructed, counting on sympathy for characters who seem to be living in an alternate universe where teenagers have never struggled with mental illness. It zig-zags for no apparent purpose. There are repeated shots of characters not being present in what is happening because they are thinking about something else and repeated shots of a washing machine running and then still, a useless metaphor.

Peter is a highly successful professional who has important meetings about financial matters in a big office with impressive views of the Manhattan skyline. He is married to Beth ( Vanessa Kirby ) and they have a baby named Theo. They live in a beautiful apartment with tastefully exposed brick walls. As the movie begins, Beth is soothing Theo to sleep with a lullaby and Peter is smiling at them. They are a perfect, happy family. But then Kate ( Laura Dern ) rings the doorbell. She is Peter’s first wife and she has bad news about their 17-year-old son Nicholas ( Zen McGrath ). For the past month, he has not shown up at school.

Nicholas moves in with Peter, Beth, and Theo and starts at a new school. Peter is convinced that things are turning around for Nicholas. They are not.

There is nothing more painful than having a child who is suffering, and perhaps it is understandable that Peter and Kate are in denial about how severe the struggle is for Nicholas. But in 21st-century Manhattan it is unimaginable that wealthy parents would be so clueless, self-involved, and disconnected from the available resources to bungle their response so badly. There are some affecting scenes, especially one where Kate, with Dern heartbreakingly vulnerable, tells Peter she feels that she has failed. And Hopkins, as Peter’s icy father, is intriguingly narcissistic.

The scene is intended to connect to the rest of the story and illuminate Peter’s conflicts and his tendency to view his son as a barometer of his success. But it falls short. The film does occasionally give us a sense of the relentless impact of mental illness on caregivers; how a sick family member, especially a child, crushes the spirit of those who care the most. When he finally loses his temper, though, it is more about his feelings than Nicholas’ and his desperate attempts to essentially order his son to get better are portrayed with more sympathy from Zeller than they deserve from us.

"The Son" also touches on the feral cleverness of some people with mental illness and their skill at finding the right vulnerable places to distract us from seeing what's going on with them or insisting on treatment. Nicholas knows Peter’s contempt for his own father’s neglect makes him especially sensitive to the suggestion that he has not been fully present, or that his leaving Kate for Beth and replacing not only his wife but his child makes it possible to divert his attention from the seriousness of Nicholas’ symptoms. Peter needs to think he is a good father so much—and needs to think that Nicholas thinks that—that he underestimates how desperately ill his son is, lulled by Nicholas’ one-two punch of recrimination and false assurance.

However, most of the power of these moments comes from our strong feelings about the issues, not from what we see, as the screenplay is superficial and manipulative. And there is a final non-twisty twist that is nearly an affront to us and the real-life families facing this pain, thankfully more sensitively portrayed in better movies.

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Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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Film credits.

The Son (2023)

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving suicide, and strong language.

123 minutes

Hugh Jackman as Peter

Zen McGrath as Nicholas

Laura Dern as Kate

Vanessa Kirby as Beth

Anthony Hopkins as Peter’s Father

William Hope as Andrew

George Cobell as Young Nicholas

Isaura Barbé-Brown as Sophia

Mercedes Bahleda as Mary

Florian Zeller

Writer (based on the play by)

Christopher Hampton

Cinematographer

Ben Smithard
Yorgos Lamprinos
Hans Zimmer

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The Son Reviews

Several movies portray the sensitive nature of suicide and depression. Unfortunately, Zeller’s movie provides a distorted reality of mental health.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

Zeller suffers a sad sophomore slump that perpetuates stereotypes about people with mental illness being dangerous.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The Son is an emotionally devastating film with a shocking yet important cautionary message for all parents.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

Hugh Jackman you saved this movie but not enough for me to recommend it

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

While it isn’t afraid to show the ugliest, most toxic parts of ourselves, it also doesn’t judge us, because we’re all trying our best.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2023

The characters played by Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern are basically the upper-class equivalents of Dumb and Dumber’s Harry and Lloyd.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 8, 2023

... A film about insecurities, and in which the weight of the performances are committed and emotionally mature. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2023

... A cold, soulless film that watches a family fall apart without caring much about it. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

If The Father (2020) was a powerful drama that left me disarmed with astonishment, then The Son made me eye-rolling several times.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

The Son is an uncomfortable sketch about familial relationships in the 21st Century with better intentions than results. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 23, 2023

As much as it is full of good intentions and great performances, the film falls short, thanks to its frustrating characters, scenes of emotional manipulation, and little interest in delving into the character of Nicholas. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 22, 2023

The Son comes across as a melodramatic parody of the play. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Mar 20, 2023

Zeller's too smart to make a truly "bad" movie, and there are some interesting ideas here... But the messaging is so blunt, and the narrative descent so predictable, it leaves little room for actual emotional engagement.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 10, 2023

Zeller explores family fractures that lead to denial and misunderstanding, but along the way prefers to tread commonplaces and employ emotional artifices. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 8, 2023

Two interminable hours that, in the end, only work as a reminder to always take contraceptive measures. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2023

By the end of this soaringly mediocre film, there is not a character you wouldn’t say that to, happily.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 2, 2023

A painful, relevant, and essentially tough film sustained by that kind of serious, solemn, quiet acting that wins so many awards.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2023

Devastating study on youth depression with a great Hugh Jackman. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 1, 2023

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the saying goes – unless you’re "The Son," which has little in common with "The Father."

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 25, 2023

It's very simple: Do not watch this film, not even with its noteworthy cast. This is pointless, unadulterated suffering, unmoored from any sense of self or reality.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Feb 25, 2023

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Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath in The Son.

The Son review – Hugh Jackman excels in solid yet inferior follow-up to The Father

Jackman plays a parent knocked off kilter by his son’s depression in Florian Zeller’s second feature, which is no match for the complexity of The Father

L et’s get this out of the way: anyone expecting Florian Zeller’s second film to match his Oscar-nominated debut, The Father , for complexity and ingenuity will be disappointed. The Son , which, like The Father, was adapted by Zeller from his stage play, is a solid, affecting domestic drama that deals with a parent – high-achieving lawyer Peter (Hugh Jackman) – struggling to cope with his teenage son’s mental health issues. It’s generally well-acted: Jackman is terrific, his expensive equilibrium knocked off kilter by his son’s failure to thrive. And in a single, scathing cameo, Anthony Hopkins drenches the screen in bile and hate. But compared with Zeller’s earlier film, this picture is rather more straightforward in its storytelling and basic in its insights.

The fact that this tale of depression is told from the point of view of the parent rather than of Nicholas (Zen McGrath), the child who is suffering from it, has proved to be controversial. But in fact this is one of the more successful, if uncomfortable elements. Zeller explores how sadness repels; how people involuntarily recoil from depression, perpetuating the isolation of the sufferer.

Drama films
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Hugh Jackman
Florian Zeller

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‘the son’ review: hugh jackman is outstanding in florian zeller’s otherwise unrewarding dirge.

Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Zen McGrath also star in this installment of the playwright-turned-director’s trilogy on mental health and its brutal impact on families, premiering in Venice competition.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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‘The Son’ Review: Florian Zeller’s Follow-Up to ‘The Father’ Is a Sadistic Family Drama

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 25 with further expansion to follow on Friday, January 20.

Florian Zeller doesn’t make films, he makes birth control at 24fps. Adapted from his play of the same name — and adding rich cinematic dimensions to the text’s ingenious structural conceit — Zeller’s brilliant and unsparing “ The Father ” shook people for how it simultaneously conveyed the confusion of suffering from dementia, and the heartache of losing a loved one to it. His follow-up, which similarly originated on the stage, makes the writer-director’s shattering debut feel like a “Paddington” movie by comparison (in terms of depressiveness and quality, alike).

Lacking any of the puzzle box magic that allowed Zeller’s previous film to rescue profound traces of humanity from the massacre of its mental illness, “ The Son ” offers a stiff and straightforward family portrait that emphasizes the senselessness of depression through the simplicity of its plot. Is it an unusually honest portrayal of parental helplessness in the face of a devastatingly cruel disease, one that may provide some measure of solace to people who’ve been cursed to live with unfathomable guilt over something they had little power to prevent? Some major contrivances and a complete lack of medication notwithstanding, I fear that it is.

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At the same time, however, “The Son” is also so pornographic in its pain (and so utterly bereft of air or lightness) that it can’t help but feel like an argument against having children in the first place. What joy could possibly be worth such agony? How are parents supposed to accept that loving their kids may not always be enough to save them? These are brave and valid questions for any film to ask — “Better to see something in a dark light than to not see it at all,” one character rightly insists — but Zeller frames them in such clumsy and stilted fashion that love ends up seeming more like a liability than a reason to live.

Excellent in a film that makes great use of his preening vulnerability, Hugh Jackman stars as Peter, the kind of father who many dads in the audience may find all too relatable. I mean, who among us hasn’t divorced Laura Dern (similarly fantastic as the frustrated Kate), remarried the much-younger Vanessa Kirby (strong but sidelined in the role of Beth), and raised an infant with her in the spacious Manhattan apartment we pay for with our elite lawyer’s salary? No, Peter is so uncomfortably familiar because of his alleged determination to give his teenage son — a souvenir from the Kate years — all the love that his own father never showed him (“The Father” is played by a prickish Anthony Hopkins , stopping by for a one-scene cameo that briefly and erroneously hints at some kind of shared Zeller Cinematic Universe).

Easier said than done. In fact, we sense that Peter’s “failure” with Nicholas may have played a role in his decision to create a new family and start over from scratch. Played by Zen McGrath, a young newcomer stranded in the role of a recessive non-character who seems more like a generic archetype of teenage depression than he does his own human being, 17-year-old Nicholas is no longer the same bundle of wide-eyed joy that Peter so fondly remembers raising as a child. He’s been sulking in his room, skipping school every day for the last month, and frightening Kate to the point that she insists he go live with Peter, Beth, and baby Theo for a while.

The situation isn’t exactly improved by the change of scenery. It’s bad enough for Peter that Nicholas remains despondent, and that he makes Beth nervous with his benign incel energy — we suspect this isn’t the kind of movie that will go full “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” even if it proves hard to relax after that errant mention of an antique rifle in the first act — but worst of all is how living with his oldest son forces Peter to confront his own guilt, and feel the strain of being a father and child at the same time.

Even at its most airless (a purgatorial register that Zeller settles into from the start), “The Son” resonates with uncomfortable truths both large and small. Infusing the part with just enough clueless vanity to make Peter seem like a life-sized Gregory Peck, Jackman mines real tragedy from the myopia of his character’s logical approach to an illogical problem.

Many of the movie’s early scenes are rich with the stonewalled frustration of a parent trying to decipher their child’s mindset from the hieroglyphics of slammed doors and mumbled conversations. Peter assumes that Nicholas’ depression must have something to do with his love life, and doesn’t know where to turn after that; for all the stone-cold severity of Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, no movie has ever so effectively dramatized how parents rely on their children’s schoolwork as a measure of their own success.

And yet, “The Son” is too suffocated by the severity of its writing and the sterility of its environments for the film’s characters to grow beyond the scenarios they represent. Yes, depression is a soul-sucking monster of a mental illness, and it’s admirable that Zeller would rather be turgid and broadly truthful in his depiction of it than riveting and harmfully false, but depriving Nicholas of any identifiable traits beyond his disease becomes artificial on its terms, and — callous as it feels to admit — makes the character far more annoying than he needs to be in order to frustrate his parents.

Similarly enervating is Zeller’s decision to trap the kid in such a drab and colorless world, which rings false in a film that eschews the degree of subjectivity that defined “The Father” (a strange choice, considering this story’s focus on how difficult it can be to reconcile the overlapping and often conflicting responsibilities the people in a family might feel towards each other). If Peter and Kate constantly find themselves caught off-balance, the audience spends every minute of this movie waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this time around there isn’t a formal structure to help seize on that schism. The one moment of levity — an impromptu family dance sequence that’s set to a Tom Jones classic — doesn’t feel like anything so much as the obligatory scene of forced happiness in the sad movie where everything goes to shit . Not even Hopkins’ appearance cuts deep enough to draw blood, even if it’s necessary to establish the hereditary kinds of hurt that Peter is so afraid of passing down to his own son.

The full extent of that hurt isn’t revealed until the final 25 minutes or so, which makes for the single most sadistic ending to any movie this side of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.” It’s not what happens that’s so punitive, necessarily — in broad strokes, “The Son” couldn’t build to any other conclusion — but rather how Zeller rubs his characters’ faces in it, and ours as well along with them. While there’s great value in a film so willing to confront the terrible fact that love isn’t always enough, “The Son” doesn’t know how to do that without spiting us in the process, delivering sucker-punch after sucker-punch until the poignancy of Peter’s helplessness is canceled out by the deviousness of Zeller’s control.

I can’t remember the last time I cried so hard, or resented every tear that I shed. I raced home to hug my own son as soon as this movie was over, relieved that he’s still only two, but also more terrified than ever that he wouldn’t stay that way. As I wrapped my arms around his little body and lifted him into the air, I found myself questioning whether today’s unfathomable joy could possibly be worth tomorrow’s potential heartache. It’s a doubt that every parent experiences at one point or (and) another, but also one that left me immensely grateful I didn’t see this movie yesterday.

“The Son” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it in theaters on Friday, November 11.

The Son review: an emotionally manipulative family drama

“The Son strives to be a devastating and insightful family drama, but it ends up feeling more like a shallow, emotionally manipulative exploration of misery.”

Hugh Jackman's intense lead performance
Laura Dern's complex supporting turn
An engrossing opening act
Vanessa Kirby and Zen McGrath's underwhelming performances
A repetitive second act
An emotionally manipulative ending

The Son wants you to feel things — namely, regret, heartbreak, sorrow, and helplessness. Despite featuring a handful of talented and very game performers, though, the biggest feeling The Son creates is frustration. The film elicits such a reaction through not only the deeply flawed ways in which it tells its story but also through the myriad of easily avoidable creative mistakes that its filmmakers make across its laborious 123-minute runtime.

What’s even worse is that there’s no reason to go into The Son expecting it to be such an inauthentic, blatantly manipulative drama. In 2020, its director, Florian Zeller, managed to create a far better film with The Father , which was, like The Son , adapted from one of Zeller’s plays and even explores a similar tale of familial strife. Unfortunately, all the missteps that Zeller could have made in The Father he ends up making in The Son — resulting in a film that’s not heartbreaking so much as it is intensely irritating.

To Zeller’s credit, The Son doesn’t struggle to feel cinematic in the same way so many previous stage-to-screen adaptations have. While most of the film takes place in one New York apartment, Zeller and cinematographer Ben Smithard succeed at making the space feel expansive enough that The Son ’s scope doesn’t ever feel theatrically restricted. Zeller, in fact, makes great use of the film’s central space from its opening scene, which follows Peter (Hugh Jackman), a remarried man, and his second wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), as they receive a surprise visit from his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern).

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The conversation that follows effectively establishes the tension and history that exists between Beth, Peter, and Kate, and it also succinctly sets up The Son ’s story. Kate, it turns out, has been forced to ask Peter for help with their teenage son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), whose resistance toward his mother and proclivity for skipping school has grown too intense for Kate to manage on her own. Peter, in response, pays a visit to his son and it isn’t long before he’s letting Nicholas move in with him, Beth, and their newborn son. For most of its 123-minute runtime, The Son subsequently follows Peter as he unsuccessfully tries to reconnect with his firstborn son and, even more importantly, fails to acknowledge the severity of Nicholas’ depression.

As simple as its story is, The Son struggles to maintain a sense of momentum or tension throughout its first and second acts, which feature long sections that are not only repetitive but often dramatically inert. While the film’s dialogue does manage to occasionally capture a sense of raw naturalism as well, it’s often hurt by its own stilted language. The characters in The Son call each other by their first names so often, for instance, that an unintentionally cold distance is created between characters who shouldn’t, at the very least, feel the need to talk in such an awkward, overly formal manner.

Most of the film’s actors manage to overcome The Son ’s strangest quirks fairly well. Hugh Jackman, in particular, turns in another emotionally intense performance as Peter, a man whose own faults and pride make him blind to the complexity of his son’s despair. Laura Dern similarly shines as Kate, a woman whose kindness and warmth can be overwhelmed at times by the feelings of abandonment that her husband and son’s departures have left her with. Jackman and Dern don’t get to share many scenes in The Son , but the film often works best when they’re on-screen together.

Vanessa Kirby and Zen McGrath fare less well throughout The Son . While Kirby’s talent has been well established at this point, she’s left more or less stranded throughout The Son in a role that feels underwritten. McGrath, meanwhile, is given the difficult task of playing a character who, thanks to Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, essentially oscillates between seeming either emotionally distraught or blank. McGrath’s performance, consequently, mostly comes across as flat, a fact which undercuts many of The Son ’s biggest emotional moments.

All of these flaws, unfortunately, don’t come close to matching the severity of the mistakes Zeller makes in The Son ’s third act. Rather than trusting in the dramatic power of the film’s story, Zeller resorts to the kind of emotionally manipulative gimmicks that rob The Son of any of the weight it had previously built up. The film ultimately feels less like an exploration of a complex issue and more like a superficial exercise in generating misery — one that hopes its audience’s empathy for its subject matter will make up all for the cheap tricks it employs in order to weaponize its viewers’ own sincerity against them.

Not only does The Son fail to put you in the same emotional headspace as its characters, but it fails, even more severely, to make any of their emotions feel real at all.

The Son hits theaters nationwide on Friday, January 20.

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clock This article was published more than 1 year ago

‘The Son’ will make you squirm, for all the wrong reasons

Florian zeller’s follow-up to ‘the father’ has none of that shattering 2020 drama’s subtlety, visual elegance or thematic heft.

Admirers of “The Father,” Florian Zeller’s shattering 2020 drama about dementia and filial devotion, will no doubt be intrigued to learn that Zeller has made “The Son,” a movie that shares some (literal) DNA with its predecessor, but none of the first film’s subtlety, visual elegance or thematic heft. Mawkish, obvious and manipulative, “The Son” is, quite simply, a disappointment, from its pat setup to its equally false — and, quite frankly, cruel — resolution.

Hugh Jackman plays Peter, a middle-aged New York attorney who as “The Son” opens has embarked on a new life with his partner, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their new baby when his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), shows up to let Peter know that Nicholas, their 17-year-old son, has been skipping school. Red flags abound in a story that turns out to be about adolescent depression, as well as adult self-deception, generational trauma and wobbly boundaries: Peter, a fixer by nature, is convinced he can get Nicholas back on track by virtue of good intentions and sheer force of will. What ensues is a slow-motion wreck that the audience can see coming down Madison Avenue, complete with a Chekhovian trope that’s as on the nose as it is breathtakingly offensive.

Indeed, “The Son” is so ham-handed, so hysterically pitched and manufactured, that’s it’s difficult to believe it emanated from the same hand that brought such skill to limning the shifting cognitive realities in “The Father.” Anthony Hopkins starred in that film as a man falling down a rabbit hole of confusion and temporal dislocation; here, he plays Peter’s father, whose aggression and insensitivity play like a burlesque of toxic masculinity. Jackman, for his part, brings intensity and focus to a role that calls for calibrated rising panic but also buttoned-up repression. (Bonus: Zeller has made sure to include at least one scene where we can see him dance.) And in just one glance, Dern clearly conveys the grief of a women who has lost not just her husband, but an entire future she had counted on. Sadly, Zen McGrath, as the suffering Nicholas, is given nothing to play outside petulance and moodiness. Unlike, say, “Beautiful Boy,” in which Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet played a father and son embroiled in a fight against addiction, “The Son” doesn’t plumb any surprising depths of mental illness. Instead, Zeller seems content to skim the most lurid surfaces of a subject that is far more complicated and nuanced than the stock beats we see here.

Nowhere is that truer than in “The Son’s” final act, a glib, cynical misdirect of the most melodramatic order. In one fell swoop, Zeller breaks faith not just with his characters, but with his viewers. What may be worse, few of them will believe a word of it.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains mature thematic material involving suicide, and strong language. 123 minutes.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – The Son (2022)

March 28, 2023 by Robert Kojder

The Son , 2022.

Directed by Florian Zeller. Starring Hugh Jackman, Zen McGrath, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Hopkins, William Hope, George Cobell, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Mercedes Bahleda, Akie Kotabe, Erick Hayden, Danielle Lewis, Van Pierre, and Jesse Cilio.

Peter has his busy life with new partner Beth and their baby thrown into disarray when his ex-wife Kate turns up with their teenage son, Nicholas.

There’s a shoulder-shrugging indifference for most of The Son ‘s running time (playwright Florian Zeller adapting his work alongside screenwriter Christopher Hampton). It’s a film about mental health, generational trauma, and fighting against repeating the father’s sins, anchored by a committed Hugh Jackman who wants an Oscar.

Then the last 20 minutes happened, which is expected since the clunky acknowledgment of a specific object meant it would come back into play for an attempt at emotional devastation. But there’s no preparation for how grossly cheap and shamefully manipulative Florian Zeller executes this. It’s so poorly done that it made me wonder if he even understood why his own breakthrough Oscar-winning hit, The Father (also a stageplay and a loose sequel to this story), wrecked people on the inside.

Being intentionally vague, Florian Zeller tries to utilize some storytelling trickery during the ending, somewhat similar to his playful but heartbreaking study of dementia in The Father , which here reeks of another tasteless plea for audience tears. It’s stunning that Florian Zeller actually goes through with the ending, yet it keeps getting worse and more offensive, to the point where the sheer notion of giving Hugh Jackman praise for this is nauseating. It raises the age-old question of whether or not a good performance is worthy of industry recognition, even if it comes from a terribly misguided film.

With that rambling disclaimer out of the way, The Son admittedly is trying to tell an important story about acute depression that deserves to be told. It is another question entirely whether it should be told in the same universe as The Father . However, it does allow Anthony Hopkins to steal the movie with five minutes of screen time, laying out why Hugh Jackman’s titular son Peter is the way he is and how his actions toward his troubled son are a reflection of that bumpy upbringing.

As The Son begins, Peter’s ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) knocks on his apartment door. She mentions that their 17-year-old son Nicholas (an unfortunately miscast rough performance from Zen McGrath) has scars on his arm, is having dark thoughts, and hasn’t gone to school in a month (there’s a random subplot that he is also a skilled hacker, which explains how schools never quite catch on to his absence). The boy thinks that living with Peter and his baby brother from the new girlfriend he cheated on Kate with, Beth (Vanessa Kirby, who might give the only honest performance in this overwrought exercise), will benefit his mental health.

From the moment Peter confronts Nicholas about self-harm, there is unmistakable dishonesty in the performance from Zen McGrath, although, to be fair, he is let down by a stagey script more concerned with bombastic dialogue than cutting to the core of these severe issues. The entirety of The Son feels made by a team of filmmakers that don’t understand depression or how to convey it authentically on screen.

That’s also a shame considering the inner dilemma within Peter is convincing enough, even when he frustratingly makes the wrong choices. There is a genuine struggle in trying to support his son even if he fails at the right way to approach the situation, which manifests in ways that disgust him as if looking into a mirror and seeing his father. His dedicated work assisting political campaigns also gets in the way of properly caring for his son and nurturing the relationship between him and Beth (the only dynamic that feels somewhat organic).

Still, it doesn’t amount to much because the entire time, it’s apparent that Florian Zeller doesn’t actually care about exploring depression and generational pain in The Son , but making his way to the insultingly cloying shock value ending. It’s enough to make one wonder if he actually gave a shit about honestly depicting dementia in The Father or if he fluked his way into an outstanding debut.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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‘The Son’ Review: Hugh Jackman Can’t Save Florian Zeller’s Bleak, Empty Drama

Zeller's follow-up to 'The Father' never reaches the emotional honesty of his previous film.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival .

In 2020, Florian Zeller released his directorial debut, The Father , a tremendously moving and powerful story about the horror of dementia and the toll that disorder takes on his family and those around him. The Father earned Zeller and his co-writer Christopher Hampton an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (based on the play Le Père , which Zeller also wrote), and won Anthony Hopkins his second Oscar for his portrayal of the title character. Zeller’s first film took a deeply tragic and shockingly honest look at a family dynamic we rarely see, and in doing so, created a deeply affecting first film that made Zeller a riveting filmmaker to watch.

As a playwright, Zeller wrote a trilogy of plays, which began with The Mother , followed by Le Père ( The Father ), and concluded with Le Fils ( The Son ). For his second film, Zeller has decided to adapt the last film in this trilogy for The Son , and once more, Zeller has reunited with Hampton on the screenplay. Yet while The Father felt like a sincere, candid look at a tragic experience, The Son is the polar opposite: a film that never feels genuine and misses the humanity that made Zeller’s debut such a masterwork.

Several years after his parents got a divorce, Nicholas Miller ( Zen McGrath ) decides he no longer wants to live with his mother Kate ( Laura Dern ). Instead, Nicholas wants to live with his father Peter ( Hugh Jackman ), who is living with his new partner Beth ( Vanessa Kirby ) and their new baby. Nicholas has been skipping school for over a month, instead, deciding to walk around the streets of New York City all day. He states that life has been weighing him down and that he wants something to change. Nicholas’ attitude scares his mother, and Peter hopes that he can help his son deal with this clearly difficult time in his life.

RELATED: Hugh Jackman in ‘Bad Education’ Makes Me Wish He'd Stop Playing Wolverine

It’s clear from the very beginning that Nicholas is suffering from a deep depression, one that he wants to shake somehow, and that Peter wants to mostly avoid, hoping for the best and that everything will eventually be fine. Peter remembers Nicholas as he used to be as a child, and now, just assumes this is a phase that will pass eventually—despite the constant warning signs and Nicholas’ statements that he doesn’t feel right. Nicholas is throwing red flags all over the place, while his family mostly waits for Nicholas to go back to the normal, carefree child he once was.

Like dementia in The Father , this type of familial struggle with severe depression is certainly a topic that should be approached with care and understanding. This is an important subject, and one that deserves a compassionate look that Zeller simply can’t provide here. Even The Father was able to manage moments of levity and moments that were so true, the audience couldn’t help but laugh. The Son , however, is stark from start to finish, and one that only tackles these issues on a surface level. Instead of showing us how scared and uncertain Nicholas is in this story—again, like Zoller did with Hopkins’ character in The Father — The Son focuses on the family and how Nicholas’ pain negatively impacts them.

In one scene, Peter goes to his father Anthony (played by Hopkins), and it’s clear Peter still has animosity toward his father. When Peter begins to talk about his own son, Anthony takes this as a hint that Peter is trying to brag about how he’s a better father than Anthony ever was. To this, Anthony states that Peter should “just fucking get over it.” While it’s clear that Peter would never make such a blunt argument to Nicholas’ own depression, there is this sort of idea that Nicholas’ life isn’t nearly as hard as Peter’s life, and that maybe the best course of action for Nicholas might actually be to “just fucking get over it.”

These complex topics and generational traumas are all interesting in theory, but with The Son , they’re all handled in a stilted and awkward way. In some scenes, The Son ’s performances almost feel like aliens trying to act like humans recreating emotions, and some moments wouldn’t have felt out of place in The Room . Even reliable actors like Jackman and Dern suffer under this material, and at least Jackman improves the further the traumas of this narrative unravel themselves. Kirby is also quite good, but that largely has to do with her being an outsider looking in on these familial issues. But more unfortunate is newcomer McGrath—not necessarily because is performance is bad, but because Zeller and Hampton’s screenplay doesn’t give Nicholas much depth beyond being a sad seventeen-year-old. Even worse is the emotional manipulation Zeller presents in relation to Nicholas. For example, Nicholas mentions that he knows his father keeps a gun in the laundry room, and in case we forget about Chekov’s dramatic principles, Zeller continuously returns to the perpetually spinning washer, a morbid reminder that the worst can still happen if we ever get too complacent in this story.

Whereas The Father made its audience feel exactly what the eponymous character was feeling, The Son tells instead of shows, reminding the audience at every stop how they should feel, whether directly through dialogue, or Hans Zimmer ’s grandiose score that builds or tears down the audience at its will. Zeller has made a world so bleak and so suffocating, we begin to feel just how trapped Nicholas feels—even if not in the way that Zeller intended.

The Son is attempting to show the weight of depression, the unpredictable nature of such a mental state, and how that feeling can be unexplainable for those suffering through it, and yet Zeller’s overblown direction and script that feels more alien than honest, a somber affair without the emotional impact that a story like this desperately needs. With The Son , Zeller is trying to bring the same sincerity he brought to The Father into his second film, and instead, The Son unfortunately feels false throughout.

The Son is in theaters now.

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Hugh Jackman’s ‘The Son’ Is Weighed Down by Its Cringe Factor

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

The complexity of The Son , as well as its flaws, are rooted in a fractured double portrait of family life. The fact is that Nicholas’s parents cannot always keep an eye on him because, for one thing, they are divorced, under circumstances that were hard for the younger Nicholas to make sense of, and for another, because his father is overly invested in his professional life, in ways that the movie ties to a broader history. Nicholas’s father, Peter ( Hugh Jackman ), is an attorney on the verge of taking a big job in politics. His own father (played, in a callback to The Father , by Anthony Hopkins ) sacrificed his relationships to his wife and son in pursuit of his career, and so Peter has gone out of his way to do the opposite.

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There’s no doubt that Zeller takes this subject seriously. But his conceptual skill isn’t matched by his writing of scenes. And the writing for Nicholas is particularly underwhelming. There’s a false idea behind it. The Son is interested in what Nicholas’s father misses, overlooks and denies — but the movie risks doing the same, by giving Nicholas such a threadbare selfhood in the first place. A movie like this feels prime for understanding a boy like Nicholas. But this one barely seems to try. The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.

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DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

January 20, 2023
Hugh Jackman as Peter; Zen McGrath as Nicholas; Laura Dern as Kate; Vanessa Kirby as Beth; Anthony Hopkins as Peter's Father; William Hope as Andrew; Hugh Quarshie as the doctor; Gretchen Egolf as the E.R. Psychiatrist

Home Release Date

March 28, 2023
Florian Zeller

Distributor

Sony Pictures Classic

Movie Review

Life is a gift , they say. So it is. And so, for many, it remains. Each day brings new joys, new opportunities. With each sunrise, the gift of life looks ever more precious.

But for some people—whether it’s because of struggles or setbacks or some strange, misfiring synapses in the brain—the gift of life can feel like that treasured Christmas-morning toy that’s been all-but-forgotten by July. The gift can feel old. Faded. Worn.

Nicholas stopped going to school a month ago. Oh, the 17-year-old sure looked like he was going to school. His mother, Kate, watched him put on his backpack and head out the door every morning. Every afternoon he’d return right on time. But instead of heading to high school, he’d walk. Walk. Walk.

“It’s not only that,” frantic Kate tells Peter—her ex-husband and Nicholas’ father. “He’s not well. You need to speak with him.”

Peter agrees, even though part of him, deep inside, may grumble. He doesn’t have time for this. Not with his schedule.

He’s always been busy, of course: You don’t get the posh office with a view of the Chrysler Building by sitting still. But even by Peter’s standards, the next several months could be exponentially more stressful. He’s been asked to help out with a prominent senator’s presidential campaign—an opportunity that just comes around once. He’s involved with a new partner now, too. And Peter and Beth have their own son together.

But, of course, if he can help his other son, he will.

When Peter does talk with Nicholas, he learns that Kate’s right: Nicholas isn’t well. He’s not well at all.

Nicholas begs Peter to let him move in with him. He’s not getting along with Mom right now, the teen says. Nicholas admits that while living with her, “I get too many dark ideas.”

Peter knows the situation isn’t ideal. To bring a troubled 17-year-old into this life … how will Beth deal with it? For that matter, how will he ?

By now, Peter doesn’t dream of refusing—not when Nicholas needs him. Maybe he’ll be able to help Nicholas where his ex could not. Maybe he can give Nicholas a little hope, a little direction, a little fatherly love.

Maybe he can help Nicholas understand that life is a gift after all.

Positive Elements

Peter has made plenty of mistakes as a father, and we’ll get into those. But he wants to do better. He wants to help his son as much as he can, and he’s willing to make some pretty big sacrifices along the way. Asking Beth to allow Nicholas to move in with them is no small thing, for one. For another, he’s willing to scrap some of his professional ambitions to make sure that Nicholas finds his footing. He loves Nicholas: We see that clearly. And he really does try to show that love in all sorts of ways.

Of course, Kate loves Nicholas, too. These days, Nicholas communicates with her mainly through icy glares, but Kate keeps trying to break through and help her son. When Nicholas leaves to live with Peter, Kate insists that he take a loaf of banana bread—a sweet, desperate attempt to again remind him how much she cares for him. “I love you,” she calls after him. Nicholas doesn’t answer.

But let’s not be too hard on Nicholas. His parents don’t understand what he’s going through, and how could they? And when he leaves for Peter’s place, it truly is an attempt to silence the noise in his head. In a painful admission, he tells someone, “Sometimes I feel like I’m not made for this life. Even so, I try every day, with all of my strength.” Ultimately, he loves his parents as much as they love him. And yet, his own pain hamstrings his ability to show that love—either to them or to himself.

Spiritual Elements

In one scene, when Nicholas is having some dark thoughts, Peter and Kate—both at their respective workplaces—seem to sense that something’s wrong. But that’s as close as the movie ever gets to a moment of even cowled spirituality.

Sexual Content

We learn that Peter and Beth met when Peter and Kate were still married. While the movie never explicitly tells us whether Peter and Beth had a physical affair, it’s clear Kate and Nicholas both blame Beth, at least in part, for their family’s disintegration.

Peter and Beth kiss and make out on a couch—clearly progressing toward more intimacy. Their foreplay is interrupted by Nicholas, who asks Peter to come and talk with him when they’re “finished.”

Nicholas tells Peter about a girl he’s thinking about asking out. We see both Peter and Nicholas shirtless.

In a flash-forward-like sequence, a grown Nicholas tells Peter that he and his girlfriend are going to be moving in together. Peter seems thrilled. When Nicholas prepares to tell him another bit of news, the son reassures a flustered Peter that he’s not going to be a father.

Violent Content

The Son deals with mental illness and self-harm. While it’s refreshingly restrained in how it deals with these issues, perhaps the biggest issue for some viewers will be that those issues crop up at all. This movie, for certain people, can be painfully disturbing and triggering. And because we’ll need to deal with it all here , I want to warn you that this section will contain spoilers .

Nicholas commits acts of self-harm, cutting his arms with knives. We only see those wounds briefly, and they’re pretty minor: “Scratches,” Nicholas says. But he does hide a knife underneath his mattress (at first, he says, for his own safety and protection). Most of the time, Nicholas keeps his arms covered with sleeves—which some suspect is because he wants to hide his cutting.

He eventually tells someone that the cutting is a way to “channel the pain”—sending the mental anguish he’s experiencing into the physical pain he’s creating. Without that outlet, Nicholas worries that he’d resort to even more drastic measures. Peter makes Nicholas promise to quit cutting.

Nicholas sometimes describes his feelings in starkly physical terms—telling his father that sometimes his head feels like it’s “exploding,” and the divorce made him feel as though he was “chopped in half”. In a fight, Peter pretty much pushes Nicholas down.

Nicholas tries to kill himself with, apparently, a knife. We don’t see the act: Peter receives a phone call and then, in the next scene he and Kate are both at the hospital. The ER psychiatrist tells them both that he’ll be just fine—at least physically. But just a matter of days later, Nicholas completes the act. We hear a gun report off camera.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear three f-words—an almost unheard-of count in a PG-13 movie—and the same number of s-words. We also hear “a–,” “h—” and about eight misuses of God’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

When Kate and Peter meet at a restaurant to talk about Nicholas, Peter initially orders a sparkling water. When Kate orders a martini, he changes his own order to have the same. Peter visits his own father at his mansion, and the two share drinks, sitting on opposite ends of a long dining table.

Other Negative Elements

You could argue that Nicholas and Peter, for a time, co-enable the teen’s issues. Nicholas regularly lies to Peter (as he does to most everyone else in his life) in an effort to make Peter think that he’s getting better. Peter, especially early on, takes in those lies and accepts them without question. “Soon, everything will be back to normal,” he reassures Kate. “Everything will be fine.”

When Peter learns (and relearns) that everything isn’t fine, he turns angry and even combative, which puts some unnecessary and damaging walls between father and son at a critical moment. (We see other scenes that seem to hurt Nicholas as well.)

But if Peter proves to be an imperfect father, he seems much better than his own. We learn that Peter’s mother was in the hospital for a long time before her death, and that Peter visited her every day. His dad rarely did—too busy with work, the excuse went, and he was always away on business. But toward the end, Peter learns that when he thought his dad was away on business, he was actually in town, eating dinner with a friend. He still couldn’t be bothered to visit his dying wife.

We Christians are taught that love is the most powerful force on earth. The Apostle Paul tells us that it exceeds the ability to move mountains, the power to understand all mysteries. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hope all things, endures all things,” he writes in 1 Corinthians 13:7.

But it cannot save all things. Not as we might wish them to be saved.

Both Peter and Kate love Nicholas, the boy that Kate still calls her “little sunbeam.” So full of life he was, so full of potential. And throughout the film, they see glimpses of that beautiful little boy again—flashes of that sunbeam. They’d do anything to help him. They do what they can to love him to a healthier place.

But a doctor tells them that their journey isn’t about “how much you love your son. … Under these circumstances, love is not enough.”

I’m not sure if I’d agree wholly with that statement. I’d say that love is still the most critical element in helping someone with mental illness. But that love can, sometimes, look different than we’d like.

We know this, of course. When we yell at a 3-year-old to not touch a hot stove, that is what love looks like. When we ground them for not doing their homework, that is what love looks like.

And when we don’t believe a loved one when they tell us that they’re doing “just fine,” when we encourage them to seek and find help—perhaps, sometimes even forcing the issue—that, too, is what love looks like.

And even then, sometimes it’s not enough.

The Son is a moving study of mental illness and all the dynamics that go along with it: how families can help and hurt; how those suffering can help and hurt those around them. The film boasts some tremendous acting, poignant-and-painful insights and—especially given the subject matter—a surprising level of restraint. Director Florian Zeller keeps our attention focused on the people and does not distract us with unsavory content. And, of course, it deals with an issue that could use more attention.

And yet, for all The Son has going for it, the film drags us through a great deal of pain for very little purpose. And for those who have their own history with mental illness, the film can drag you into darker places than you’d like to go. Despite its honesty and artistry, The Son misses the mark.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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The Son Review

When Florian Zeller first adapted one of his own plays for the screen, the result was one of cinema’s most remarkable depictions of ageing. In The Father , he put the audience, movingly and terrifyingly, inside the head of a man succumbing to dementia, reality constantly shifting in a way neither he nor the audience could keep up with. The Son is another adaptation of a Zeller play ( The Mother , as yet to be adapted, rounds out that stage trilogy). It’s another moving story, though sympathy is more baked into its premise than earned through the storytelling. It’s a familiar tale solidly told and well-acted, but without the remarkable invention of The Father .

Hugh Jackman reminds everybody what a strong dramatic actor he is, in his sturdiest role in years. He plays Peter, a successful Manhattan lawyer who has a new wife, Beth ( Vanessa Kirby ), and a new son. His first wife, Kate ( Laura Dern ) — whom he left for Beth — and teenage son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) are inconveniently keeping him from moving on. Nicholas is having terrible issues with his mental health, unable to face school and feeling permanently sad. He begs to come and live with his dad. Both hope it will fix everything, but Nicholas’ health gets steadily worse.

There are some lovely scenes between Peter and Nicholas as they try to figure each other out, and a brief appearance by Peter’s own dad ( Anthony Hopkins , walking off with the whole movie) gives interesting framing to Peter’s view of his son. Much of it, though, is played at a curiously melodramatic pitch. It’s not fully stagey, but there is an edge of artifice. Zeller presses hard on emotional moments to extract maximum pain, but it becomes more exasperating than affecting.

Everything is a little too self-conscious, but the longer the film goes on, the more it seems this artifice might be a deliberate choice

Nicholas is given to big speeches, expressing his torment in long, earnest monologues that don’t sound spontaneous. The characters often act as they should to keep the plot moving, rather than how they might believably behave. Beth, who has been nothing but kind to Nicholas, suddenly shouts terrible things about him in a tiny apartment where she will obviously be overheard. Wealthy Manhattanites Peter and Kate are remarkably uninformed about therapy. Everything is a little too self-conscious, but the longer the film goes on — and it does rather go on — the more it seems this artifice might be a deliberate choice, to make the entire world as dishonest and uncomfortable as Nicholas sees it.

The cleverest aspect is the way Zeller leaves the ending hanging over you like a curse. The seeds as to where the film might be going are sown early on, but the film quietly suggests many ways they may come to fruition. When the ending comes it’s simultaneously shocking and bleakly obvious. It’s a shame Zeller didn’t just let it sit starkly alone instead of adding a syrupy coda. Like much of this film, it could have been more effective by holding a little back.

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Riveting thriller with less violence than most; sex, nudity.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Everything may not always be as it seems; sometime

Troubled main character is determined, courageous,

Most battles are waged without physical violence o

Opening scene shows a couple in the last moments o

Wine is served in social situation. The main chara

Positive Messages

Everything may not always be as it seems; sometimes it's hard to determine who is believable and who isn't. It's worth being patient and using resolve to uncover the truth. Evil may be well-disguised. In a symbolic way, touches upon the overwhelming obligations of parenthood.

Positive Role Models

Troubled main character is determined, courageous, and devoted, even when his own actions and behavior work against him. Character strengths stressed: friendship, empathy, and perseverance.

Violence & Scariness

Most battles are waged without physical violence or brutal images, but are still disturbing, suspenseful, and in some instances, even horrifying. In a lengthy scene, a woman giving birth behind a locked door howls with pain. Her husband fights fiercely to enter the room. A man roughly takes baby from woman, who then falls. Character threatens another with gun; bloody body is later discovered. Police roughly take a man into custody.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Opening scene shows a couple in the last moments of sexual intercourse, with some nudity, including bare breasts.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Wine is served in social situation. The main character is a recovering alcoholic. Prescription drugs are mentioned both for pregnancy and for mental instability. A character injects herself with an unknown substance.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Son is a psychological thriller from Argentina, in Spanish with English subtitles. The movie is based on The Protective Wife , a novel by Guillermo Martinez. An impassioned artist and his biologist wife conceive a much-wanted baby boy. The wife's isolating, obsessive behavior during the pregnancy and after the baby is born, combined with her husband's intensifying suspicion, strains their relationship to the breaking point. Rather than physical violence or scares, most of the tension in the film comes from implications of danger, furtive stalking, the protagonist's mindset, and an unconventional ending. The violent or disturbing scenes include a brief struggle during which a woman falls, a man held at gunpoint, and the discovery of a body. A lengthy, noisy off-camera childbirth sequence, heard through a locked door, may be unsettling for some. The movie opens with an ardent sex scene; a nude couple is seen in the last stages of intercourse (with female breasts exposed). One curse, "f--k," is heard. There's some social drinking. A main character is a recovering alcoholic; another injects herself with an unidentified substance. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

Argentinean Lorenzo Roy (Joaquin Furriel) and his Norwegian wife Sigrid (Heidi Tioni) are desperate to have a baby in THE SON. Overjoyed when Sigrid becomes pregnant, they eagerly anticipate their baby son's arrival. Both have pasts that make them uneasy. Lorenzo, a former alcoholic, has no relationship with his two daughters from a first marriage. Sigrid suffered a miscarriage and is hyper-vigilant about this pregnancy. After initial help from a doctor, she decides to forego further medical assistance, makes some peculiar decisions about her medication, and decides that the baby will be born at home. Lorenzo is puzzled by Sigrid's increasingly odd behavior. When she brings in a surly midwife from Norway, the two further isolate Lorenzo from the preparations. The actual birth further separates husband and wife. Things get worse as the months pass. Lorenzo is given little time with the baby. Basically, they've locked him out. He strongly protests, then confides in his closest friends, Julieta (Martina Gusman) and Renato (Luciano Caceres), who sympathize, but are concerned about his agitated mental state. When Sigrid involves the police, Lorenzo erupts with an astonishing claim. He believes Baby Henrik isn't his child. Events escalate in a tightly drawn battle of wills.

Is It Any Good?

This movie, with terrific performances and stellar direction, comes with an ending that will leave an audience either exhilarated or peeved, depending on their willingness to appreciate a sly puzzle. Director Sebastian Schindel keeps the tension high, the developing events mysterious, and rooting interest uncertain. Motives are always perplexing. Is Sigrid a caring mom or a villain? Is Lorenzo believable, paranoid, or a sufferer of Capgras Syndrome (a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter)? The Son is seen from Lorenzo's perspective or, in later significant moments, from the perspective of Julieta, his friend and lawyer, and it works. Schindel's decision to leave conversations between Sigrid and the midwife untranslated from Norwegian works well. It leaves the audience in the dark just as Lorenzo is. For fans of psychological thrillers where the stakes are high and the answers aren't easy, it's a very satisfying movie.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the scares and tension in The Son . Does the movie live up to its "thriller" classification? How much of the conflict results in actual violence? How much is based on psychological dread and audience apprehension? What do you think is the difference in the impact between graphic violence and more subtle terror?

Some viewers may find the ending of The Son to be puzzling and/or abrupt. Would you agree or disagree with them? How much did the production team choose to leave to the audience's imagination? What do you think Julieta saw? Is it intriguing to figure it out for yourself, or did you feel cheated?

What techniques did the filmmakers use to accelerate the tension and scares (i.e., music, lighting)?

How was Lorenzo's home used as a "character" in the film?

Movie Details

On DVD or streaming : July 26, 2019
Cast : Joaquin Furriel , Heidi Tioni , Martina Gusman
Director : Sebastian Schindel
Inclusion Information : Latino actors
Studio : Netflix
Genre : Thriller
Run time : 92 minutes
MPAA rating : NR
Last updated : February 18, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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'The First Omen' Review: This Horror Prequel Suffers From an Extreme and Tedious Story

R ichard Donner's "The Omen" began when Robert Thorn, played by Gregory Peck, replaced his wife's dead baby with the literal son of the devil. But did you ever wonder how that baby was born in the first place? The producers of "The First Omen" are hoping the answer is yes and they're hoping your standards aren't high.

Let's be frank: "The Omen" movies, love them or hate them, have never been subtle or classy. They're known for Jerry Goldsmith's throbbing choral score and their gory supernatural death scenes, which laid a Satanic foundation for the non-denominational "Final Destination" series decades later. Gregory Peck didn't bring respectability to "The Omen;" "The Omen" took it from him. And the only reason we don't say the same thing about William Holden in "Damien: Omen II" is because nobody seems to care very much about "Damien: Omen II" except for Meshach Taylor's epic elevator death.

Director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson's prequel, "The First Omen," is frustrating in the way many prequels are frustrating. The events of the original four films -- the remake doesn't seem to count -- are sacrosanct and cannot be altered. So most of "The First Omen" is just about getting us where we know the plot has to go.

Stevenson seems painfully aware of how boring this path is, so she spruces "The First Omen" up with absurd goriness and a handful of revelations (all puns intended) that don't add up to much because they can't add up to much. The new movie's twists can only exist if they don't contradict the previous films, so only a few surprises are even possible and those surprises can only happen in unsurprising ways.

"The First Omen" begins with Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, "Game of Thrones"), an American who moves to Rome to become a nun. She's living at a creepy orphanage full of creepy people, like a little girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who is kept separate from the other girls and draws creepy pictures. Another nun, who looks creepy, proceeds to act creepy and then creepily copies one of the creepier deaths in the original series, except now it's completely on fire, which makes it less creepy and borderline ridiculous.

A rogue priest named Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, "The Green Knight") asks for Margaret's help uncovering a sinister conspiracy inside the church. Believe it or not, the birth of the Antichrist might be involved. So Margaret starts poking around and eventually some very, very gross things happen.

It's not surprising that a film about giving birth to the Antichrist in a nunnery has some hangups about pregnancy and, in particular, the Catholic church's stance on abortion. In case you haven't heard, they're against it. Arkasha Stevenson's "The First Omen" isn't afraid to argue that having an abortion can be a good thing, but then again, it only says this in the context of the apocalypse getting involved.

And again, "The First Omen" is a prequel about how the Antichrist was born, so although the theme of abortion is an interesting direction for this movie to go, it doesn't seem to have been allowed to get very far and that undermines most of what the movie has to say about the topic.

Then again, the "Omen" movies have never had particularly much to say, except that the apocalypse would probably be bad and should be avoided. These films have historically used religion and fanaticism as a backdrop for shocking kills, thematic depth be damned. Stevenson's film has a much greater investment in its gore than in its characters and story, and when the movie gets grotesque it is, if nothing else, memorable.

It's easy to imagine this film finding a cult audience, if only for its bizarre violent imagery and one scene in particular, where Nell Tiger Free gets to be completely emotionally and physically unhinged. But despite a few superficial overtures and ham-fisted twists -- which are practically pre-ordained, given the prequel's few narrative options -- it has little to offer beyond that extreme mayhem, and even that's mostly backloaded into the third act.

If you're looking for gross nun pregnancy stuff you seem to have a lot of options lately. "The First Omen" is one of them. It's a tired entry in a franchise that's been tired for about 40 years, but Nell Tiger Free does her weird job well and Arkasha Stevenson proves she can turn brutality into artsiness and, with a more interesting story, probably into fascinating art.

"The First Omen," for all its many flaws, could turn out to be an effective prelude for the careers of Free and Stevenson, but it's an underwhelming prelude to "The Omen."

"The First Omen" hits theaters April 5.

The post 'The First Omen' Review: This Horror Prequel Suffers From an Extreme and Tedious Story appeared first on TheWrap .

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Elizabeth Hurley is entangled in a secret affair in steamy clip from son Damian’s directorial debut

Watch a scene from Damian Hurley’s sensual thriller “Strictly Confidential.”

Jessica is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she covers TV, movies, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in Bustle, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, and more. She lives in California with her dog.

Elizabeth Hurley finds herself caught up in a secret love affair in Entertainment Weekly' s exclusive first look at a scene from her son Damian Hurley 's feature directorial debut, Strictly Confidential .

The racy scene (above) features a rendezvous between Hurley and Pear Chiravara, whose characters Lily and Natasha begin a tryst while on a Caribbean island. Natasha doesn't want it to come to an end, but Lily says she hates deceiving everyone, including her daughter.

"One day, you won't have to," Natasha says. "But everything's too fragile right now. No one can take another bombshell."

Courtesy of Lionsgate

Also written by Damian Hurley, 21, Lionsgate's Strictly Confidential follows a young woman named Mia (Georgia Lock) who returns to the Caribbean paradise where she and her late best friend Rebecca (Lauren McQueen) shared their final days together. As Mia sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding Rebecca's death, old passions arise, and secrets are uncovered, leading her into a world of sex, betrayal, and murder.

Speaking about directing his mother in such racy sex scenes, Damian recently said that while it may seem "strange" to outsiders, it felt "totally normal" to him. "I don’t know what that says about us," he quipped to The Sunday Times . "I was speaking to a lot of my friends who are also second generation of parents in the industry. They say exactly the same thing: that things to outsiders that may seem totally strange and extraordinary, for us we’ll just have grown up with in everyday life."

Franziska Krug/Getty

After noting that there were no intimacy coordinators on set, Damian said, "Everyone was very comfortable."

The only son of Hurley and the late producer and businessman Steve Bing, Damian's other credits include a role in the series The Royals and the short The Boy on the Beach , which also starred his mother. Elizabeth's most recent credits include films The Piper and Christmas in the Caribbean.

In a 2022 Instagram post celebrating the conclusion of filming, Damian praised his "beautiful and supreme mother" for accompanying him on his creative journey. "I want to worship [Elizabeth Hurley] who, during the making of my first ever short film back in 2010 (when I was 8) promised me she'd be in my first feature; true to her word, the minute this film was greenlit, Mama dropped everything and raced out to the beautiful Caribbean to help," he wrote. "Working together was a dream."

Also starring Freddie Thorp and Genevieve Gaunt, Strictly Confidential arrives in theaters and on digital April 5.

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‘Strictly Confidential’ Review: Makeout Scenes and Flimsy Melodrama on a Caribbean Isle

Producer-star Elizabeth Hurley’s son Damian wrote and directed this sometimes amusing ersatz thriller, which often seems more a tourism lure for St. Kitts and Nevis.

By Dennis Harvey

Dennis Harvey

Film Critic

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“Some secrets are meant to stay buried” says the ad line for “ Strictly Confidential .” But you’d need a sizable underground bunker to contain all the effortfully shocking revelations sprung in this very silly sudser, which starts out looking like an erotic thriller-mystery, then descends into a series of flashback-laden explication monologues more apt for “Dynasty” than Agatha Christie.

A note of fashion/travel advertisement is struck immediately with images of bikinied thespians floating in clear blue waters, writhing in the arms of muscular shirtless men, and so forth — an opening montage not elevated when it turns out to be dreamt by someone bathing in the requisite luxury bathtub surrounded by (doubtless scented) candles.

That someone is Mia (Georgia Lock), who seems to wake from another such vaguely troubling reverie every 20 minutes or so here. She is the erstwhile best friend of Rebecca (Lauren McQueen), who presumably drowned herself last summer. But as the reasons for suicide were obscure, her body remains unfound, and her father had also died a rather murky death just weeks prior, the whole affair as yet lacks “closure.”

Mia has a lot of questions about what happened last summer. No one else wants to talk about it — albeit not from painful grief, it turns out. Rather, it’s because they’ve all got guilty secrets to hide. They hide them pretty poorly, since gape-mouthed Mia keeps walking in on people caught making out with the “wrong” other party.

There are also flashbacks to other makeout scenes, though the initial steamy musk redolent of vintage “Skinemax” and Zalman King movies proves deceptive. Eventually the film grows less interested in softcore suggestiveness than murder-mystery-adjacent plot mechanizations as convoluted (and flashback-laden) as they are increasingly ridiculous.

Somewhere around the two-thirds mark, escalating levels of pure tosh begin to perversely work in the movie’s favor. What had been a mildly scenic if paper-thin diversion turns into the kind of joint whose narrative big reveals also trigger big laughs — with considerable help from hackneyed dialogue and some awkward acting moments. The histrionic burden falls heaviest on Lock, who cannot be said to emerge unscathed.

But in truth, as written and directed, these roles might flummox the most talented interpreters. Plausibility of action and psychology appears to have taken a distant back seat to concerns of how the performers look in the variably skimpy or low-cut costumes by Gabbi Edmunds. Likewise, George Burt’s widescreen cinematography eschews any suspenseful atmospherics in favor of a bright, bland showcasing of handsome getaway decor (Tom Downey is the production designer) and attractive beach views. Michael Richard Plowman’s original score further underlines that we’re basically watching a cheesy soap opera in B-movie form.

Purportedly shot in just 18 days, “Strictly Confidential” is most kindly viewed as on-the-job training for the junior Hurley, who under those circumstances acquits himself well. His film has sufficient professional polish and passable entertainment value, intentional or otherwise. But one assumes his scriptwriting did not suffer from the same time constriction, in which case that labor should definitely be left to others in future projects.

Reviewed online, April 3, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 88 MIN.

Production: (U.K.) A Lionsgate release of an MSR Media International presentation of an MSR Media SKN production. Producers: Elizabeth Hurley, Philippe Martinez. Executive producers: Barry Brooker, Alastair Burlingham, Gary Raskin, Charlie Dombek, JT Foxx, Karinne Behr, Lee Beasley, Jacob Katsman.
Crew: Director, writer: Damian Hurley. Camera: George Burt. Editor: Frederic Fournier. Music: Michael Richard Plowman.
With: Elizabeth Hurley, Georgia Lock, Lauren McQueen, Freddie Thorp, Genevieve Gaunt, Pear Chiravara, Max Parker, Llyrio Boateng, Aji Nanjosi, Centia Corbie.

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Screen Rant

Godzilla x kong: the new empire ending & monsterverse setup explained.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire sees the former foes unite against a common enemy, while the ending lays the groundwork for another MonsterVerse film.

Warning: Major spoilers for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire below!

Godzilla and Kong join forces to defeat the Skar King, utilizing new Titan Shimo's ice-breathing abilities.
Kong finds a surrogate family in the Hollow Earth and frees enslaved apes with young Suko's help.
The film's ending hints at a potential Son of Kong sequel in the MonsterVerse's future.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire sees the iconic kaijus reluctantly teaming up to stop an apocalyptic threat, with help from some old and new friends. The MonsterVerse franchise's latest entry sees Godzilla defending the surface world while Kong explores the Hollow Earth. Their paths are soon on a collision course when Kong unearths a hidden layer of the Hollow Earth and discovers an enslaved race of apes, ruled by the cruel Skar King. Meanwhile, a mysterious distress signal calls both The New Empire's human cast of characters and Godzilla himself down to the Hollow Earth.

It is revealed - thanks to some conveniently placed wall carvings - that Godzilla was the one who trapped the Skar King, who now wants to break free to the surface. Once there, Godzilla x Kong's main villain plans to use an ice-breathing Titan to cause a new ice age . A reborn Mothra unites Godzilla, Kong and the human characters, and after a tough battle both in the Hollow Earth and the world above, the Skar King is slain and a second ice age averted. Kong returns to the Hollow Earth , while Godzilla takes a well-earned nap in Rome's Colosseum.

Where To Watch Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - Showtimes & Streaming Status

Godzilla & kong defeat skar king with shimo's help, godzilla x kong's ice-breathing titan is enslaved by the skar king.

Skar King is seeking revenge for being trapped inside the Hollow Earth after his last bout with Godzilla and decides revenge is a dish best served icy cold. In addition to having enslaved most of the apes, he also has a Titan called Shimo under his control. The simian Titan uses a special crystal capable of causing Shimo intense pain, and while she doesn't want to fight on the Skar King's behalf, the kaiju has her completely under his command.

Godzilla, Kong and Shimo gang up on the Skar King in the finale, with the ice-breathing Titan freezing the kaiju with her frost breath. When Kong notices one of the Skar King's eyes is still moving, he smashes the frozen Titan to pieces.

That is until Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire's finale, where the kaijus clash in Rio de Janeiro. After a gruelling fight, Kong's new ape pal Suko smashes the crystal the Skar King has been using to control Shimo. Now free of his influence, Godzilla, Kong and Shimo gang up on the Skar King, with the ice-breathing Titan freezing the kaiju with her frost breath. When Kong notices one of the Skar King's eyes is still moving, he smashes the frozen Titan to pieces.

In introducing Shimo and the Skar King, Godzilla x Kong gave the MonsterVerse Titans some worthy foes to battle. Despite her world-ending potential, Shimo is really far too adorable and sympathetic to be a true villain and reveals her true colors once freed of her captor's influence.

Shimo's appearance was first teased in the graphic novel Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted when Kong looks at a cave painting of her.

Kong & Suko Return To Hollow Earth To Free The Apes

Kong has finally found the family he was seeking.

When Godzilla x Kong opens, the latter Titan cuts a lonely figure. He came to the Hollow Earth because he needed a new home - following the destruction of Skull Island - and to seek others of his own kind. When the story begins, his search looks hopeless, until he happens upon an entrance to the Hollow Earth's hidden depths. This is where he meets the young ape Suko, who initially tries to ambush him, but they soon form a nice father/son bond.

Suko proves invaluable in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire's finale when he shatters Shimo's crystal. Having averted a new ice age, Kong, Suko and Shimo return to the cave where the Skar King's slaves reside and frees them . Having spent so many decades alone, The New Empire finally gives Kong the new family he has been searching for.

How Mothra Is Alive In Godzilla x Kong

Godzilla x kong kept mothra out of the sequel's marketing.

Mothra is one of the Godzilla movie franchise's most iconic kaijus and made her debut in the MonsterVerse during 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters . Mothra sacrificed herself in King of the Monsters's finale to save Godzilla , but she returns once again in the latest MonsterVerse adventure. Mothra's return ties into the human storyline of The New Empire , where Rebecca Hall's Dr. Ilene Andrews takes adoptive daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) - who is seemingly the last of the Iwi tribe - into the Hollow Earth to investigate a kaiju signal.

Following an Iwi ceremony, Jia revives Mothra, who soon flies to the surface to break up the latest brawl between Godzilla and Kong.

During Godzilla x Kong's second act, Ilene, Jia, Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) and Dan Stevens' Trapper find an Iwi tribe living deep within the Hollow Earth. Jia and the tribe are psychically linked, and there is an Iwi prophecy stating Jia must bring Mothra back to life to stop the Skar King for good. Following an Iwi ceremony, Jia revives Mothra, who soon flies to the surface to break up the latest brawl between Godzilla and Kong. In the final battle, she stays behind to hold off the Skar King's troops while Kong and Godzilla chase the monster through a portal.

Godzilla's Supercharged Form & How He Gets More Powerful

Godzilla levels up before his hollow earth trip.

Just like 2021's Godzilla vs Kong , the King of the Monsters doesn't get much screentime in The New Empire. When the movie opens, Godzilla is battling other Titans that occasionally emerge to menace mankind, but when he senses something is brewing in the Hollow Earth, he charges up on radiation. This includes seeking out the serpent Titan Tiamet, who also appeared in the comic spinoff Godzilla Dominion .

Godzilla and Tiamet then have a nasty underwater fight, though the former quickly emerges the winner. Godzilla then absorbs all the energy from Tiamet's lair to "supercharge" himself , giving him a distinctive pink color scheme when the process is complete. This makes his atomic blasts even more powerful and comes in especially useful during Godzilla x Kong's ending.

Kong's Power Glove Upgrade Explained

Godzilla x kong introduces the b.e.a.s.t. glove.

The trailers for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire have been proudly showing off Kong's new mechanical gauntlet. This glove is saved for the final act, and while it might help sell Kong toys in real life, it serves a story function too. The Titan's first encounter with Shimo does not end well, and Kong receives severe frostbite on his right arm . Realising Kong is in no condition for the upcoming battle against the Skar King, the human characters recall a prototype gauntlet was constructed following the events of Godzilla vs Kong .

The characters of Jia, Dr. Ilene Andrews and Bernie all return from Godzilla vs Kong .

In that MonsterVerse installment, the two Titans teamed to fight MechaGodzilla, and they both barely survived. Monarch thus built the B.E.A.S.T. Glove prototype to give Kong some help if a similar, MechaGodzilla-shaped challenge presented itself , though the project was ultimately abandoned. Thankfully, the gauntlet was shipped to the Hollow Earth, so Trapper retrieves it from a Monarch base, attaches it to Kong's wounded arm and restores him to fighting shape. The B.E.A.S.T. Glove packs a suitably hefty punch, being able to demolish buildings in one hit.

How Godzilla x Kong's Ending Sets Up The Monsterverse's Future

Is son of kong the next monsterverse sequel.

The sequel breaks with tradition from most cinematic universes by featuring no Godzilla x Kong post-credits scenes of any kind. Instead, just about everyone receives a happy ending. Jia decides to return to the surface with Ilene instead of staying behind with the Iwi tribe, while Bernie and Trapper become new best friends. Godzilla returns to the Colosseum to rest until the next Titan threat emerges, while Kong, Suko and Shimo return to the Hollow Earth.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Review - Satisfying Kong Story & Fun Action Uplift MonsterVerse Entry

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire doesn't set up any future Titan threats and is something of a standalone adventure. That said, Kong and Suko becoming a surrogate family suggests the next Kong movie will be Son of Kong . The giant ape hasn't had a solo adventure since Kong: Skull Island and this sounds like a promising direction to head in. Even so, it also suggests Suko could eventually take the reins and that Kong could die in a future MonsterVerse sequel.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes , The Numbers

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

After nearly destroying each other in 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong, the giant Titans are back to face a new dangerous threat, but this time, they are on the same side. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the fifth film in Warner Bros.' growing Monsterverse franchise and will be directed by Adam Wingard.

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‘Shogun’ Episode 7 Recap: Death Wish

As the walls close in around Lord Toranaga, his vassals and family look for ways out.

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A man wearing black and gold armor and a matching cloth hat looks warily to his left.

By Sean T. Collins

Season 1, Episode 7: ‘A Stick of Time’

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Few cinematic genres have had as fruitful a conversation with one another as the samurai film and the western, so it’s only fitting to use an epigraph from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to sum up the central conflict in this week’s episode.

It begins in full “print the legend mode,” as the director Takeshi Fukunaga brings us a dreamlike flashback depicting the aftermath of Lord Toranaga’s first victory in battle, achieved before he’d have been bar mitzvah’d. The rogue warrior whose forces he defeats calls for the young Toranaga himself to serve as his second in the ritual of seppuku. An overhead shot shows us the lad preparing to strike the deathblow from a point of view that feels a million miles away, less a bird’s-eye view than a god’s.

But looks can be deceiving. Ask Saeki (Eita Okuno), Toranaga’s estranged half brother, upon whose support the lord of Edo is counting if his fight against Lady Ochiba and the Regents is to be successful. He’s happy to tell Toranaga’s adoring son, Nagakado, that his pops severed the head of the rebel with a single stroke at the tender age of 12. No such thing occurred — Toranaga hacked away nine times like a miniature ax murderer before finally decapitating the man.

But Saeki isn’t doing this to flatter his older brother. He’s doing it to taunt him. He knows Toranaga’s sense of honor will make hearing exaggerated accounts of his exploits uncomfortable. And he knows that by elevating Nagakado’s image of his father, he can send it crashing back down all the more easily. So he tosses in the tale of how young Toranaga soiled himself when he was sent away as a hostage. That’s not the kind of story that makes it into the legendarium.

It’s also not the kind of story you tell if you plan to ally yourself with the boy who fouled his breeches. Indeed, despite initially giving every appearance to the contrary, Saeki has no intention of taking up his older brother’s cause. He announces that he has accepted Lord Ishido’s offer of membership on the Council of Regents, and has been dispatched to summon Toranaga to his impeachment and execution. It takes everything the lord has left in him to prevent his Nagakado from blindly accepting Ishido’s order to commit seppuku over the cannon attack he ordered in Episode 4.

The Toranaga of decades past wasn’t fit to deliver the coup de grâce to the rebel lord, and the Toranaga of today refuses to do the same to his country. He could defend himself, issue the order for Crimson Sky, make war on Osaka, declare himself shogun — but he won’t. “No one has the right to tear the realm apart,” he tells his assembled vassals as he agrees to surrender to the Council.

There’s just one problem with Toranaga’s pacifism: It’s not just his own execution to which he’s marching. His household, family and many of his vassals will be expected to follow him in death. “Behold the great warlord,” Blackthorne sneers when he understands what’s happening. “Brilliant master of trickery, who tricked his own loyal vassals into a noiseless smothering.” He turns to those lords and warriors and addresses them in their own language, “You’re all dead.” (He spares a parting expletive for the Crimson Sky plan.)

Blackthorne isn’t the only person sworn to Toranaga’s service who’d prefer not to go gently into that good night. Elsewhere in the episode, Yabushige makes a failed attempt to broker a separate peace; Ishido sends his emissary’s severed head back in a box.

But one character take matters even more directly into his own hands. Acting in concert with the courtesan Kiku, Nagakado leads a small band of assassins into the teahouse where Saeki is enjoying Kiku’s services. But the fight that ensues ends in disaster when Nagakado slips and falls before his own attempt to chop off an enemy’s head, braining himself on a rock in the teahouse’s garden. Even Saeki, who’d betrayed Nagakado’s father and was seconds away from dying by the youth’s sword, feels the sting of the loss. “Where is the beauty in this?” he says, staring down at the corpse.

Perhaps he might ask Buntaro and Mariko. This unhappy couple is morbid in the extreme. Buntaro wants nothing more than to kill Blackthorne for warming his wife’s icy heart in a way he never could. Buntaro came dangerously close to taking out Blackthorne when he interrupted a friendly sparring session between the Anjin and Lord Yabushige, but opted to submit the issue to Toranaga later as a formal request.

(For his part, Yabushige remains the show’s wild card, as apt to ostentatiously bathe in the presence of Saeki’s soldiers as he is to boil one of Blackthorne’s men alive. You never know with this guy!)

Even as her husband aims to punish her lover, Mariko desires above all to kill herself, finally following the rest of her family. Like Buntaro, she puts this request directly before her liege lord.

Toranaga denies them both, going so far as to slap the ceremonial blade from Mariko’s hand. It’s enough to make you wonder if Kiku’s madame, Gin (Yuko Miyamoto), is right when she notes that it’s out of character for a seasoned warlord like Toranaga to leave his forces so vulnerable to those of his brother. If he truly planned to meekly submit to his own death, why would he be so forcefully averse to Mariko’s?

Maybe there’s more to the future than meets the eye. That’s certainly Gin’s belief. After Mariko brokers a brief meeting between the madame and Lord Toranaga in exchange for Kiku’s services with Saeki, Gin uses her time to ask for the construction of a special red-light district in Toranaga’s burgeoning city, Edo. When he protests that he has no future to offer her, she doesn’t buy it. Surely the great Toranaga has one last legend in him.

An earlier version of the article misidentified the name of the courtesan character. She is called Kiku, not Fuji.

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The Son movie review & film summary (2023)
As the movie begins, Beth is soothing Theo to sleep with a lullaby and Peter is smiling at them. They are a perfect, happy family. But then Kate ( Laura Dern) rings the doorbell. She is Peter's first wife and she has bad news about their 17-year-old son Nicholas ( Zen McGrath ). For the past month, he has not shown up at school.
The Son
Movie Info. A cautionary tale that follows a family as it struggles to reunite after falling apart. THE SON centers on Peter (Hugh Jackman), whose hectic life with his infant and new partner Beth ...
'The Son' Review: Father Doesn't Know Best
The movie may take place inside a pit of despair, but the theatrics leave us with the uncanny sensation of feeling nothing at all. The Son Rated PG-13. Divorce and remorse.
The Son review
The Son is a beautifully composed and literate drama with impeccable performances, especially from Jackman: the sleek Manhattan lawyer gleaming with corporate prestige in his corner office (the ...
'The Son' Review: Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern Go Deep
Music: Hans Zimmer. With: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Hugh Quarshie, Anthony Hopkins. In devastating family drama 'The Son,' director Florian Zeller assembles a stellar ...
The Son
The Son is an emotionally devastating film with a shocking yet important cautionary message for all parents. Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023. Zach Pope Zach Pope Reviews. Hugh ...
The Son review
The Son, which, like The Father, was adapted by Zeller from his stage play, is a solid, affecting domestic drama that deals with a parent - high-achieving lawyer Peter (Hugh Jackman ...
'The Son' Review: Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller's Depression Drama
September 7, 2022 10:15am. Hugh Jackman in 'The Son' Courtesy of Venice Film Festival. Hugh Jackman 's affecting performance as a father accustomed to managing every situation, in over his head ...
The Son Review: Florian Zeller's Follow-up to The Father Is Sadistic
The full extent of that hurt isn't revealed until the final 25 minutes or so, which makes for the single most sadistic ending to any movie this side of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist.". It ...
The Son (2022)
The Son: Directed by Florian Zeller. With Vanessa Kirby, Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Shin-Fei Chen. Peter has his busy life with new partner Beth and their baby thrown into disarray when his ex-wife Kate turns up with their teenage son, Nicholas.
The Son
Peter's (Hugh Jackman) hectic life with his infant and new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) is upended when his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) appears with their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who is now a teenager. The young man has been missing from school for months and is troubled, distant, and angry. Peter strives to take care of Nicholas as he would have liked his own father to have taken care of ...
The Son review: an emotionally manipulative family drama
The Son. Score Details. "The Son strives to be a devastating and insightful family drama, but it ends up feeling more like a shallow, emotionally manipulative exploration of misery.". Pros ...
Review
January 18, 2023 at 9:55 a.m. EST. Hugh Jackman, left, and Zen McGrath in "The Son." (Rekha Garton/See-Saw Films/Sony Pictures Classics) ( 1 star) Admirers of "The Father," Florian Zeller ...
'The Son' Ending Explained: A Divisive and Tragic Conclusion
Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many ...
The Son (2022)
The Son, 2022. Directed by Florian Zeller. Starring Hugh Jackman, Zen McGrath, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Hopkins, William Hope, George Cobell, Isaura Barbé ...
'The Son' Review: Hugh Jackman Can't Save Florian ...
Movie Reviews; The Son (2023) Hugh Jackman; Laura Dern; About The Author. Ross Bonaime (611 Articles Published) Ross Bonaime is the Senior Film Editor at Collider. He is a Virginia-based critic ...
The Son Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Son is a heavy drama about teenage depression and the crippling effect it can have on a family, with themes around suicide, self-harm, and strong language.It stars Hugh Jackman as Peter, whose teen son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), comes to live with him, his partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their baby.Nicholas is living with mental health issues and the film examines ...
Hugh Jackman's 'The Son' Is Weighed Down by Its Cringe Factor
The Son is interested in what Nicholas's father misses, overlooks and denies — but the movie risks doing the same, by giving Nicholas such a threadbare selfhood in the first place. A movie ...
The Son
The Son is a moving study of mental illness and all the dynamics that go along with it: how families can help and hurt; how those suffering can help and hurt those around them. The film boasts some tremendous acting, poignant-and-painful insights and—especially given the subject matter—a surprising level of restraint.
The Son
The Son Review. Peter's (Jackman) life with new wife Beth (Kirby) and son is shaken when his ex-wife tells him she's very worried about their teenage son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath). Nicholas has ...
The Son Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Son is a psychological thriller from Argentina, in Spanish with English subtitles. The movie is based on The Protective Wife, a novel by Guillermo Martinez.An impassioned artist and his biologist wife conceive a much-wanted baby boy. The wife's isolating, obsessive behavior during the pregnancy and after the baby is born, combined with her husband's intensifying ...
'The First Omen' Review: This Horror Prequel Suffers From an ...
"The First Omen" begins with Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, "Game of Thrones"), an American who moves to Rome to become a nun. She's living at a creepy orphanage full of creepy people, like a little ...
Elizabeth Hurley sizzles in son Damian's movie, 'Strictly Confidential'
Courtesy of Lionsgate. Also written by Damian Hurley, 21, Lionsgate's Strictly Confidential follows a young woman named Mia (Georgia Lock) who returns to the Caribbean paradise where she and her ...
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Sonic the Hedgehog 3: Directed by Jeff Fowler. With Ben Schwartz, Colleen O'Shaughnessey, Idris Elba, Cristo Fernández. Plot under wraps
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Elizabeth Hurley's son Damian wrote and directed this occasionally amusing thriller, which often seems more a tourism lure for St. Kitts and Nevis.
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire sees the iconic kaijus reluctantly teaming up to stop an apocalyptic threat, with help from some old and new friends. The MonsterVerse franchise's latest entry sees Godzilla defending the surface world while Kong explores the Hollow Earth. Their paths are soon on a collision course when Kong unearths a hidden layer of the Hollow Earth and discovers an enslaved ...
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