Florian Zeller has already devastated audiences in 2020 with his movie The Father, based on his own stage play and adapted by Christopher Hampton, with Anthony Hopkins as the old man being cared for by his daughter played by Olivia Colman while he succumbs to the tragic endgame of dementia. Maybe the title of Zeller’s new film The Son – again from his own play with a Hampton screenplay – provides a kind of emotional rhyme or complement to that.
The Son is a laceratingly painful drama, an incrementally increased agony without anaesthetic. At the centre of it, Hugh Jackman gives a performance of great dignity, presence and intelligence as Peter, a prosperous New York lawyer whose life is enviable: he is divorced (that situation being now amicable enough), remarried with a baby son, and on the verge of a political consultancy which might give him some sort of superstar future role in the White House.
