Nanni Moretti’s patient family drama is moving because its early happiness feels as credible as its grief. The performances carry it through the sweeter passages, though Nicola Piovani’s music sometimes does too much persuading.
Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room is a moving family drama, patient enough to earn most of its emotion and occasionally too eager to help us feel it. Its opening gives a contented family time to seem comfortable, even a little complacent, without treating that comfort as a moral failing. That matters: we need to care about their ordinary life before grief disrupts it. Moretti directs with an affection that does not require everyone to be especially interesting or admirable.
The screenplay by Linda Ferri, Nanni Moretti and Heidrun Schleef treats Giovanni’s wish to make sense of suffering as understandable but inadequate. A father can keep examining what has happened without finding anything that will help his family. Moretti’s performance gives that frustration a vulnerable, recognisable weight, and he avoids making Giovanni’s pain seem impressive. We were moved by Moretti’s helplessness as Giovanni: he makes the effort to understand his pain look exhausting and useless.
Laura Morante gives Paola a force that prevents the film from becoming only Giovanni’s account of the household. Her distress is difficult to watch, and Moretti leaves room for it without making her responsible for explaining everyone’s feelings. The family remains recognisably a family even when its members cannot make things easier for one another. We do sometimes want more distance from Giovanni, but Morante keeps drawing our attention back to a person whose suffering does not fit tidily around his.
Giuseppe Lanci’s cinematography is valuable for its discretion; we can attend to the family without being continually invited to admire the image. Giancarlo Basili’s production design makes the domestic surroundings feel familiar enough to matter. The home registers as somewhere these people have already spent years together, rather than somewhere furnished to demonstrate their sadness. Those intimate domestic details help make the family’s grief believable, giving the performances a credible setting.
Esmeralda Calabria’s editing supports the film’s willingness to stay with discomfort instead of hurrying towards relief. At 99 minutes, it allows time to observe the household and still feels compact. The domestic passages matter because the people remain interesting when they are doing little that advances a plot.
Nicola Piovani’s score is the clearest weakness. Its sweetness sometimes encourages a response the actors have already earned, and the extra prompting makes the grief feel less raw. We understand the wish to offer tenderness, but there are moments when the music seems unwilling to leave pain alone. The reservation matters because the domestic details and performances are already persuasive; the additional sweetness makes them briefly seem less so.
Moretti does not expect his characters to find helpful words for everything they feel. That is a welcome choice in a genre too often crowded with speeches about the importance of talking. A cooler score would have helped, but the performances make the family’s unhappiness difficult to dismiss. We recommend it when there is time for a quiet evening, rather than when a sad story is expected to provide a comfortable cry.
