Peter (Hugh Jackman), a New York business lawyer tempted by politics, receives a worried phone call from his ex-wife (Laura Dern): their son Nicholas, 17, is a school dropout and has broken off the dialogue with her. Peter agrees to welcome him to his apartment in Manhattan, where he has rebuilt his life with a young girlfriend (Vanessa Kirby), who has just given him a new child… Peter is willing, but this “workoholic” doesn’t really know how renew the dialogue with his big teenagerplagued by existential anxieties.
With “The Son”, Florian Zeller tackles an eternal theme, that of generation conflict, of the incommunicability between parents and a teenager locked up in his questions and his dark thoughts. He does this by choosing to erect the portrait of the fathera man who “made himself”, once morest the image of his own father, a monster of selfishness (Anthony Hopkins, present in a single scene, masterful), and which was built on a limited number of values – work, merit – without asking too many questions. Her son’s silence will painfully explode her certainties.
“The Son” is undoubtedly a less perfectly accomplished film than “The Father”. But through a fluid staging, without fuss, and sober and fair dialogues, he manages to ask the essential questions: what is a successful life? What is it to be a “good father”? The film does not give a definitive answer, to each his own truth. And the cast assembled by Zeller is top-notch in backing up what he has to say.
