The Son (2022)

Florian Zeller follows The Father with The Son, a film that swaps a disintegrating mind for a disintegrating household. Peter is a successful lawyer with a new wife, a newborn, and a seventeen-year-old son from an earlier marriage who arrives depressed, withdrawn, and no longer enrolled in school. The screenplay, adapted by Zeller and Christopher Hampton from Zeller's own 2018 play, keeps the stage in its bones: rooms, confrontations, doorways, and the low hum of a conversation that will not go well.

For those of us who keep the cultural ledger, the film is a noticeably bare document. The cast is white and the film does not appear troubled by this. There are no queer characters, no feminist reading of the household, no racial dimension, no environmental concern, no indictment of the lawyer's comfortable income, no body politics, no neurodivergence framework, no revision of history, and no sermonizing. Depression and suicide are treated as private catastrophes with no social dimension attached. This is not restraint in service of subtlety. It is simply a story about a man and the boy he failed.

The final act lands hard and lands alone: Nicholas, briefly hopeful, makes tea for his parents, talks about a family outing, and shoots himself in the next room. Zeller then offers three years of imagined alternative life, and Peter's collapse. Critics were unkind, and the aggregate scores reflect a picture that mistakes volume for depth. Hugh Jackman is genuinely good. The film around him is a heavy, well-acted exercise in remorse, and it lectures no one about anything beyond the cost of a father's inattention. On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, it scores nothing at all, which in this instance is neither a triumph nor a failing, merely a fact.