Cinema last year was a tangle of family angst. Films conceived and shot in lockdown leaned hard on small casts and big tears. The best movie of 2022 – Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, about a final father/daughter holiday – was one example. So too, more surprisingly, was the biggest box office performer of the year: Top Gun Maverick, the story of a middle-aged teacher trying to patch things up with his quasi-son.
Some of 2023’s early offerings, those dramas jostling for awards contention, fall into this bracket: The Whale, The Son, The Fabelmans, Empire of Light. All are tales of dysfunction and domestic betrayal (and, for the last two at least, hangovers of the 2020 worry that cinemas might shut forever).
