Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Sony Pictures
One of the easiest ways for a horror movie to generate suspense is by making its characters wholly ignorant about the threat they face—so that, for example, they’re unprepared to battle a vampire because they don’t know what one is, much less how to kill it.
It’s a cheap storytelling shortcut, and it’s one that’s doggedly employed by The Son, Florian Zeller’s follow-up to last year’s The Father, whose entire domestic drama hinges on the abject cluelessness of its parental protagonists. Only tragedy can ensue when no one knows about depression (its symptoms, its causes, its treatments), and ensue it most certainly does, after two lugubrious hours of adults crying, fuming, and acting like uninformed dolts.
Zeller’s The Father was a narratively astute and formally sharp portrait of dementia, which makes the writer/director’s latest—as with his prior work, an adaptation of his play of the same name—a stunning misfire.