Cinema review: The Son is excruciating, painful, visceral viewing

There will be times when you wonder why on earth you are inflicting this on yourself, a grim film which gets grimmer and grimmer and which twists and turns you in a tension which is pretty soon unbearable.

If you want cinema that entertains you and takes you away from everything, watch absolutely anything other than this. If you want cinema that makes you think and feel, The Son is in a class of its own, a gruelling, near-impossible watch which will shred you.

In fact, it feels as if it ought to come with some kind of warning beyond a mere listing as a 15 certificate. If you are not in a good place mentally, if you are feeling fragile, maybe if you have some experience of the issues the film raises, you would probably do best to stay away. It is a devastating, ultimately heart-breaking watch – the tale of a 17-year-old New York lad who feels the weight of the world on his shoulders, who tells people repeatedly that he just cannot cope and who, quite simply, isn’t listened to.

Not that his parents are bad people. Absolutely not. Quite the contrary. It is just that they aren’t picking up the signs in the way – so easy to say after the event – they really ought to.

Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father is again based on his own stage play and adapted by Christopher Hampton, and once again we get Anthony Hopkins though this time in the briefest of cameos.

Instead the focus is on the younger generations, his son Peter – superb from Hugh Jackman – as a high-flying New York lawyer, newly remarried, with a baby son and his eye on a big political role for a senator in the upcoming primaries; and on Peter’s son, the dark and deeply troubled Nicholas (mesmerising from Zen McGrath), a boy whose cries for help aren’t heeded.

Peter can’t believe that his wife Kate (excellent from Laura Dern) hasn’t even noticed that Nicholas has played truant for a month. When Nicholas asks to move in with Peter and his new family in the hope of changing things up a little, Peter in turns doesn’t notice either as Nicholas continues his truancy. And yet Nicholas continues to say the things which really ought to be triggering all the alarm bells.

Again, it is not that Peter doesn’t care.

Jackman is brilliant at conveying a man increasingly haunted, haggard and hunted; similarly Dern’s Kate is at her wits’ end, trying to love, trying to care but confronted by what appears to her to be hatred. In the background, Peter’s new wife Beth (yet another terrific performance, this time from Vanessa Kirby) is in an awful situation, trying to be a new mum while welcoming a dark and difficult presence into her own home.

Everyone comes to it with the best intentions, and there is a truly harrowing scene in the hospital when Nicholas begs to be released while the medical staff are firm that he has to stay. In the end it is down to his parents, the most awful of choices as decent people descend into impossible territory.

Just before the end, the film plays a pretty gross trick which is unworthy of it – and which simply doesn’t work.

But apart from that there’s a sureness and an inevitability about it all which makes this excruciating, painful, visceral viewing.