Florian Zeller makes family dramas about people who cannot understand what is happening to those closest to them. We admire his ambition, but The Son exposes a serious weakness: he explains the parents’ distress until the child scarcely registers.
Fi1m perspective
Hugh Jackman’s Peter can manage a successful legal career, but he cannot work out how to help his son. In The Son (2022), Zeller gives that failure of confidence a credible actor and too many explanations. Jackman finds painful uncertainty in a father who wants to do the right thing. Then the dialogue tells us how much he is suffering, although the performance has already made it plain.
Zeller came to film by adapting his own plays, making his directing debut with The Father (2020) before following it with The Son. The earlier film showed that he could turn a stage work into cinema rather than merely record it. Christopher Hampton has joined him on the screenplays. The change between the two films matters: The Son takes a simpler approach, which puts more pressure on the writing of individual characters.
Zeller and Hampton are right to take Peter’s guilt seriously, and right to resist a neat explanation for teenage depression. The difficulty is where they keep our attention. The Son gives the adults repeated opportunities to describe their distress, while Nicholas, played by Zen McGrath, remains thinly written. We were frustrated because each further explanation of the parents’ anguish brought us no closer to the boy. We needed some sense of Nicholas outside these conversations, something that would let us imagine a person with a life beyond the problem his parents are trying to solve.
Zeller has written with particular actors in mind, including Anthony Hopkins for The Father. That attention to the performer is encouraging, and Jackman’s work shows why it matters: his uncertainty makes Peter worth watching even when the dialogue is letting him down. It also makes the lack of detail in Nicholas harder to excuse, since so much of the film depends on our concern for him. Jackman is a reason to watch a scene, not a reason to sit through The Son. — Fi1m
Biography
Florian Zeller is a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter and film director. Born in Paris in 1979, he graduated from Sciences Po and began his career with novels before turning to theatre. His plays, including the family trilogy The Mother, The Father and The Son, have been staged worldwide and translated by Christopher Hampton.
Zeller made his feature directorial debut with the 2020 film adaptation of The Father, which he co-wrote with Hampton. The film won Academy and BAFTA Awards for its screenplay. He directed and co-wrote the 2022 screen version of The Son, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In 2023 he was awarded France's Legion of Honour, and in 2025 he was elected to the Académie Française.
