My Son (2021)

Christian Carion's My Son arrives with a gimmick that sounds like a dare: James McAvoy was handed no script, no dialogue, only the backstory of a father named Edmond, and told to improvise his way through a Scottish kidnapping thriller. The result is a performance of twitchy, unmoored intensity, which is either a triumph of raw technique or the sound of a man guessing. The plot is a straight line. A boy vanishes from camp, an absentee father returns, the father tortures a stranger with an oxy-acetylene torch, the father storms a hilltop lodge. No thesis is attached to any of it. This is a remake of the director's own French film from 2017, a curious act of self-plagiarism that nobody involved seems troubled by.

What the film declines to do is lecture. Child abduction is treated as grim fact, not as a platform. The villainy belongs to a trafficking ring, not to an economic system, and the camera never pauses to educate us about either. Claire Foy's Joan gets a moment of agency, finding a drugged girl in a car and driving her to a hospital, but the movie keeps its gaze fixed on the father's bruised quest. The cast is white, Scottish, and entirely unbothered by the question. Race, sexuality, climate, body image, neurodiversity: these are not subjects the film has any interest in raising, and it raises none of them. The improvisational conceit is a formal gambit, not a sermon, and the social messaging amounts to nil.

Critics were unkind, citing a thin plot, and they were correct about the thinness without being wrong about the strangeness. We are left with a competent, joyless thriller that wants only to be a thriller, and in this cultural moment that restraint reads as almost eccentric. A sommelier of such things would call it a dry vintage. No notes of ideology. Just cold Highland air and a man shouting lines he invented five seconds earlier.