THE SON Review: French playwright-turned-film director Florian Zeller returns

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After his well-received debut The Father, which netted Anthony Hopkins an unexpected second Best Actor Oscar, French playwright-turned-film director Florian Zeller returns with The Son, another adaptation of one of his own plays. Hopkins stars in a supporting role as the father of Peter, the protagonist played by
Hugh Jackman. The play and now the film are about Peter’s struggle to figure out how to be a father to his two children, a newborn with his new girlfriend as well as his 17-year-old son with his ex wife (played by Laura Dern in perfect ex-wife mode).

It’s especially Nicholas, the teenager, who gives him pause, as he seems to have still not processed his parents’ divorce and it has taken a mental toll on him that’s perhaps greater than his parents realise. Made with much of the same team as Zeller’s previous feature, this second work looks and feels indeed like part of a future trilogy (the third play, The Mother, was actually the first of the three produced but it has yet to be filmed). Yet The Son doesn’t have the neat visual metaphor of The Father, turning this into a wellexecuted but also largely familiarfeeling family drama.

Peter (Jackman) is a big-shot New York lawyer who’s about to be asked to be on the team of a senator considering a bigger political career. It’s something he always hoped would happen and the moment finally seems to have arrived. But then, his ex-wife Kate (Dern) knocks on the door of the apartment he shares with new girlfriend Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and their newborn son, Theo.

Kate is distraught and worried about their teenage boy, Nicholas (Australian actor Zen McGrath), who hasn’t been to school for a month, though she has only now found out.