Peter’s (Hugh Jackman) life is a busy one.  On the edge of a major breakthrough in his career as a legal consultant for a rising politician, and with a newborn child back at home with his second wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), he is trying to do everything he can to be a good father and a good husband.  One night, however, his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), knocks on Peter’s door and tells him that their son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is having trouble at school and that he wants to move in with him and Beth.  The readjustment brings about many emotions for the entire family, and when Nicholas begins to show signs of troubling anxiety and depression, Peter needs to make difficult decisions about how best to care for his family.   

Florian Zeller, after his much-praised feature directorial debut, The Father (2020), brings his second stage play to the screen with The Son, reteaming with Christopher Hampton to assist in writing the adaptation.  This time around, the family drama is much more straightforward, as it does not seek to put audiences in the shoes of Anthony Hopkins’ titular father who was experiencing the disorientation of dimentia, but rather, The Son is more interested in examining another kind of patriarchal absence in the form of Peter whose work/life balance is heavily skewed and is beginning to negatively impact those who depend on him.  From its title, one would expect The Son to focus more heavily on Nicholas, and while the boy does shoulder a good bit of screen time, this remains Peter’s story. 

The often-dynamic Jackman can normally bring life into these more cut-and-dry dramas, but here he seems bored by the role, held back and completely neutered from a script that is so bluntly written that there is no nuance and it is hard to believe the same team that brought The Father to screen only a few years prior had such a steep, sharp, and sudden decline in quality. It is frustrating to see one of the most electric actors of our time knocked down by such a stunted script, but he does his best to deliver even though his performance faces the same narrative roadblocks as audiences do when watching. It is not that The Son is not trying to draw conclusions about our evolving look at masculinity as it relates to family dynamics, but that Zeller and Hampton do not seem nearly comfortable enough to form and promote their thesis. They hesitantly tiptoe around these concepts, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions, while they themselves offer no framework for the discussion. 

All men are sons to someone, and Peter finds himself in the middle of the narrative as both a father and a son. Towards the middle of the film, he finds time to visit his own father, played by Anthony Hopkins in an unrelated role to his 2020 Oscar-winning performance. Like the rest of the script, Hopkins’ role is bluntly written as an old-timer with little regard for sensitive feelings when there is money and power to be had outside of the home. His inclusion is really only there to make Peter not seem as ineffective as he actually is because at least Peter is questioning if he needs to focus more time at home. Zeller, instead of actually allowing Peter to grow with action, and therefore give poor Jackman something to do on screen, Peter’s development is defined more by what he is not than what he is. Without an arc that allows the character to grow into something, there is little for anyone on screen or seated in the audience to invest in. 

Back home, Zeller is also wholly uninterested in the idea of “the husband,” as he underutilizes Dern and gives Kirby even less to do in the film. Instead, his focus is on Nicholas, a son, who is given such a poorly thought out, and downright insensitive at times, depression narrative. The script does McGrath few favors as Zeller gives the boy the most canned and broad dialogue about how the world feels like it is closing in on him and that there is nothing for him to do about it. It is a valid mindset, especially for a young man in a fractured family who shows an affinity for the arts breaking the more business-minded pettigree of his family, but Zeller refuses to examine any deeper than the surface level of these very real issues. The role is further complicated because Jackman and McGrath have little chemistry together on screen and their relationship is supposed to be what drives this narrative, yet it feels so cold and empty throughout. This is understandable at the onset as the two begin to learn how to live with one another after a period of estrangement, but besides saying that he is worried about his son – and oftentimes, he reveals these feelings and fears to anyone except Nicholas – Peter does little to move the dial on their relationship in any meaningful way.  

Zeller employs a very small bit of magic realism in the final moments of The Son. Some years after the main events of the film, Peter is hosting a dinner at the apartment with Beth when Nicholas arrives early to deliver his father his not-yet-published debut novel which was dedicated to him. As the scene progresses, however, everything rings just a little too perfectly before revealing this is playing out in the imagination of Peter. Zeller, earlier in the film, has also opted to include a textbook example of Chekov’s gun which Nicholas uses to end his own life in, what appears to be, the same apartment in which Peter and Beth still live. While some sensitivity was shown in having the death occur offscreen, it feels so distasteful to end the story on such a tragic note after Zeller denied the youth any hope or chance of grace in the preceding, punishing, 123 minutes. To pick the story up for this point and have the grieving Peter recall these memories of his son mixed with these imaginings of what could have been would have probably drawn a separate kind of ire towards Zeller – accusations he is just repeating the same format as The Father – but it certainly would have been a better approach than what was displayed here, allowed the characters a chance of deeper introspection and likewise outward change, and just be a more interesting approach to the story overall. 

Many times, when making the jump from stage to screen, scripts suffer as the mediums are far more different than they may initially appear. That is not the case with The Son, rather, this film suffers from a flawed script that seems uninterested in its own ideas and provides the actors with little to nothing to do. The story here is half-baked at best, and the pacing is glacial which stretches this simple, singular idea far beyond its limits. Instead of finding a more creative way into the shifting generational views of masculinity and patriarchy, Zeller flounders around in the middle ground, never really stating an argument and never allowing the drama to unfold. With his stage play The Mother as of yet adapted and not yet announced by Sony Pictures Classics, hopefully, he can return to form with a stronger script and clearer vision to round out his triptych of familiar dramas.