This movie was written/directed by Florian Zeller, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Father. While The Father explored the crushing disease of dementia through the lens of a father/daughter relationship, Zeller's follow-up The Son explores mental illness through the lens of a father/son relationship.

When I first saw this movie, the synopsis provided by IMDb said "Peter has his busy life with new partner Beth and their baby thrown into disarray when his ex-wife Kate turns up with their teenage son, Nicholas." While this is somewhat accurate, it does not mention the predominate theme of the film, which is Nicholas' severe depression and the inability of his parents (Jackman & Dern) to cope with or even recognize their son's crippling mental illness. This is the real story this film is trying to tell, and it does so well through a difficult and heartbreaking two hours that ultimately ends up exactly where you fear it would.

Before it gets to the seemingly inevitable outcome, we increasingly see how blind both Nicholas' parents are to what is really happening to him, whether through ignorance or wishful thinking. Numerous times throughout the film, Peter (Jackman) frustratingly asks Nicholas (played exceptionally by Zen McGrath) to explain his bizarre behavior, in attempts to rationalize it to himself. At times, Nicholas says bluntly to his mother, Kate (Dern), "I'm not well" but she, too, either does not recognize his behavior as mental illness or simply prefers to rationalize it as something else, with Peter's leaving of Kate and Nicholas for another woman, Beth (Kirby) being the convenient scapegoat for his behavior.

When watched through the lens of someone with severe mental illness crying out for help to the people who love him most, only to have those people fail to recognize his illness and be unable to give him the help he truly needs, this movie is gut-wrenching. I felt it was a good analogy on how some view mental illness (even some of those who wrote IMDb user reviews trivializing Nicholas' illness and behavior) as something that is a choice and not a genuine disease with serious risks.

As is sadly too often the case, no one closest to him either recognizes or admits that Nicholas is seriously mentally ill, and that ignorance ultimately costs him his life. After a failed suicide attempt lands him in a psychiatric hospital, Peter and Kate go against the pleading of medical professionals and bring him home, in yet another example of them not understanding and/or downplaying the severity of what is happening to their son. Shortly after they bring him back to Peter's apartment, Nicholas kills himself with his parents in the next room. The final scene shows us Peter dreaming of an interaction with Nicholas where he survived his second suicide attempt and managed to turn his life around. For a moment, the audience is teased with the prospect of a happy ending, only for that to be shattered when Beth walks into the room and asks Peter what he's doing, and the viewer sees the room is empty. The final image we see in this film is Peter breaking down as Beth consoles him, a fitting ending for a film that explores the devastation of mental illness.

While admittedly not as good of a film as The Father, I did think this was a good movie, albeit a tough watch. The kind of solid performances you'd expect from this cast (which also included a cameo by Anthony Hopkins as Peter's father), and what I believe is a refreshing and brutally honest look at mental illness without the glossing over that films often do with this subject matter. I gave it a solid 7/10.

I'll address the first thing that I see on the negative reviews: Zen McGrath as Nicholas does not "sell" it. I thought the same thing as I was watching the movie, he never brought me in, he was hard to read, he had a smirk that threw me off, a little smile that was hard to decipher, he seemed sarcastic and out of it, I never felt his pain... but after days of thinking about this film this is what I realized:

Teenage kids are hard to read.

That is the whole point.

I am a parent of a 15 year old boy and this movie shook me to my core. It really did. The parents couldn't read the boy (much like I feel most of the time), they went with what they saw from him and trusted that gut feeling vs what professionals were telling them, they trusted the memories they had as though those represented who the boy was now, they trusted their own desire for things to normalize, they trusted the good moments, they went with the unmistakable desire that "things will be ok". They let those desires take the wheel.

This is Hugh Jackman's best performance to date as a parent desperate for things to be ok as he dealt with his own issues of being a son himself, he wanted to avoid being a monster... not realizing that being a friend wasn't the solution.

X.

Not all movies are meant to entertain. Some movies are meant to inform or to educate. Some movies are meant to explain how life really is for some people. This movie stands at the pinnacle for trying to help others comprehend mental heath issues that very few people understand. If you haven't lived that life, please shut up and save your artistic criticisms for another movie. I don't care what you think. This movie tried to look at the mental health issue from all sides - parent, child, and other loved ones. It was gut wrenching. It was an extraordinarily realistic depiction of what goes on in a family torn apart by mental health battles. Life becomes a war zone. And during the battle or after the war you begin to reflect and it tears you apart. You ask yourself what just happened. You ask yourself how it happened. And guess what - you have no answers to your questions. Bravo Mr. Zeller.