The Nest. (12A.)
Directed by Sean Durkin
Starring Carrie Coon, Jude Law, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell, Adeel Akhtar and Anne Reid. 107 mins. In cinemas.
This is a haunted house film where the occupants are so ghastly that no supernatural element is required. In the mid-80's brash, financial whizz kid Law decides to move his American family back home to Britain, where he believes he can cash in on the impending Big Bang of deregulation in the City Of London. He leaves his wife Coon and their two kids in an enormous old country mansion he's rented while he tries to make a big score working in one of the few tower blocks in the City at the time.
Durkin's film is a slippery one to categorise. Theoretically, it's a drama about a family falling apart but there is something unknowable about its scope and aims. Though his second feature is less overt in the use of distancing and alienating devices than his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene, it still finds numerous ways to gently unsettle the viewer. Above all, it's a skin-crawlingly awkward portrait of a BS artist.
A vain deluded fool who is led astray by overconfidence in his charm and talent, it's the part Jude Law was born to play. He has to give his all to the role of ageing whizz kid Rory O' Hara because that's the only way to play someone who never lets up. Coming from a poor background, he's swallowed the line that he can be anything he wants to be and is totally thrown when the game stops rewarding him the way it used to. Nominally, Coon's wife is the lead character but, although she's as good as always, Law's character dominates the film. There's a tremendous scene late on in the back of a taxi where he has no one left to lie to except himself, but he still can't quite bring himself to stop. I don't think he's ever been better.
It's a period film that harks back to an earlier era, the sixties films of Antonioni, or Losey's Pinter adaptations, films where the emptiness of rich families was symbolic of the wider malaise. Poor families are wretched just for themselves, the upper-class families do it for all society.
The symbolism here though is opaque. Surely Rory's the carrier of the yuppie disease that will infect the country and rot away our society yet in the film it's this stuffy country and its stifling conventions that brings the family down.
Directed by Sean Durkin
Starring Carrie Coon, Jude Law, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell, Adeel Akhtar and Anne Reid. 107 mins. In cinemas.
This is a haunted house film where the occupants are so ghastly that no supernatural element is required. In the mid-80's brash, financial whizz kid Law decides to move his American family back home to Britain, where he believes he can cash in on the impending Big Bang of deregulation in the City Of London. He leaves his wife Coon and their two kids in an enormous old country mansion he's rented while he tries to make a big score working in one of the few tower blocks in the City at the time.
Durkin's film is a slippery one to categorise. Theoretically, it's a drama about a family falling apart but there is something unknowable about its scope and aims. Though his second feature is less overt in the use of distancing and alienating devices than his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene, it still finds numerous ways to gently unsettle the viewer. Above all, it's a skin-crawlingly awkward portrait of a BS artist.
A vain deluded fool who is led astray by overconfidence in his charm and talent, it's the part Jude Law was born to play. He has to give his all to the role of ageing whizz kid Rory O' Hara because that's the only way to play someone who never lets up. Coming from a poor background, he's swallowed the line that he can be anything he wants to be and is totally thrown when the game stops rewarding him the way it used to. Nominally, Coon's wife is the lead character but, although she's as good as always, Law's character dominates the film. There's a tremendous scene late on in the back of a taxi where he has no one left to lie to except himself, but he still can't quite bring himself to stop. I don't think he's ever been better.
It's a period film that harks back to an earlier era, the sixties films of Antonioni, or Losey's Pinter adaptations, films where the emptiness of rich families was symbolic of the wider malaise. Poor families are wretched just for themselves, the upper-class families do it for all society.
The symbolism here though is opaque. Surely Rory's the carrier of the yuppie disease that will infect the country and rot away our society yet in the film it's this stuffy country and its stifling conventions that brings the family down.
