Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

The Son Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson May 15, 2023

French playwright and filmmaker Florian Zeller's 2018 play Le Fils is the third work in a family trilogy following La Mère (2010) and Le Père (2012). The latter play was adapted by Christopher Hampton and Zeller into the Oscar-winning film The Father (2020) starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. The Son (2022) has also been adapted into a screenplay by Zeller and Hampton, who's translated several of Zeller's plays from French to English. In The Son, Peter Miller (Hugh Jackman) is a high-powered Manhattan attorney with aspirations to become either a political consultant or key advisor to a senator friend running for president. Peter lives with his second wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby) in a SoHo loft where they're raising their infant son Theo. Peter receives a knock on his door and opens it to see his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern), who delivers the troubling news that their 17-year-old son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) has become very depressed and skipped school over the last month. Nicholas states that life has been weighing him down and he's been having problems at home. He wishes to live with his father, a proposition that sits well with Peter and one that Kate accepts with reluctance. It's more uneasy for Beth. Nicholas blames her for causing his parents' divorce. Beth finds a knife underneath Nicholas's mattress and henceforth doesn't trust him to babysit Theo while Peter and her go out.

The seeds for Peter failing Nicholas were planted by his own father, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins). Peter visits Anthony at his palatial home out in the country. Anthony is a narcissistic, self-absorbed man who had a successful political career at the expense of his own family. He doesn't want to hear about his son's difficulties with Nicholas and when he hears Peter admonish him for not coming to the hospital when his wife was ill, Anthony remonstrates him to forget about the past. When Peter begins spending more time with Nicholas, they share lighthearted moments on the couch eating cereal. Peter, Beth, and Nicholas sing Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” together but this moment of joy only gives the teenager temporary relief. He and his father still get in verbal arguments and heated confrontations.

Zeller and Hampton choose to focus on Peter's grief rather than probe Nicholas's mental health. This results in arguably the finest dramatic performance of Hugh Jackman's career. The shortcoming is that the script portrays Peter and Kate shortsighted on the effects and treatment options for their son's severe depression. Granted, Peter is a workaholic and hasn't made the effort to spend ample time with his son or understand his condition. But The Son isn't really a clinical study of mental health as it falters in its exploration (or lack thereof) of Nicholas's illness. Australian actor Zen McGrath (in his feature debut) looks something like Timothée Chalamet. Nicholas is exactly the kind of character I could have imagined the Dune star playing a decade ago. McGrath still has room to develop as an actor and I believe Chalamet would have been better had he been granted the role. Anthony Hopkins is most effective in his limited screen time and The Son could have used a lot more of him since there's additional insights into the Miller family history that could be learned.

The Son Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sony's spring release of The Son receives an MPEG-4 AVC encode on this BD-50 (disc size: 36.28 GB). The movie appears in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1. My research indicates that the DI was likely finished at 4K, though I don't know at what resolution The Son was projected at in theaters and on the festival circuit. In an interview with Darek Kuźma for the March 2023 issue of Cinematography World magazine, cinematographer Ben Smithard stated that apart from a short excursion to the south of France for film flashback scenes (which you can see in Screenshot #s 4 and 10) and a three-day trip to New York to shoot some exteriors and live plates, most of The Son was shot from September to October 2021 at OMA:X Film Studios in London, where Peter and Beth's apartment was built. Smithard says he chose the standard Tungsten package and some LEDs for his lighting equipment. For interiors, he utilized ARRI SkyPanels with frequency because of the flexibility they have for tweaking the color temperature. The Rosco SoftDrop Translight, an artificial backdrop, was used for Peter and Beth's Manhattan apartment, which measured 100 x 40 feet. (See Screenshot #s 9, 11, 14, 16, and 17). Kuźma has documented for the record that The Son was shot with the Sony Venice camera along with Zeiss Supreme Primes (18, 21, 25, 29, 35, 40, 50, 65, 85, 100 and 135mm), as well as Angénieux Optimo 19.5-94mm T2.6 and Zeiss Compact 28-80mm T2.9 zoom lenses.

Sony's 2K transfer of The Son is clean with no artifacting. The image is often dim. For brighter scenes, there's frequent white light with not much natural sunlight. The one exception is scenes of Peter and Kate's vacation with 6-year-old Nicholas (George Cobell) in the aforementioned frame grab #s 4 and 10. Sony has encoded the movie at a mean video bitrate of 29867 kbps (feature size: 31.91 GB).

Sixteen scene selections accompany the 123-minute feature.

The Son Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sony has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround mix (2091 kbps, 16-bit) and an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Descriptive track (640 kbps). Spoken words are consistently clear and intelligible. The film's main sound track does a fine job of reproducing the ambient noise of New York City on the surround channels. I could clearly hear the f/x outside the brownstone homes in the Brooklyn scenes. Hans Zimmer delivers a somber score that's underscored with low-pitched chords from his piano keyboard. There are also lovely, melodic strings that ascend to punctuate the drama. Zimmer's score for The Son is reminiscent of the dramas he scored earlier in his career, particularly Rain Man (1988), although the music is generally more low key here than what he wrote for Levinson's Oscar-winning drama. The Son's musical notes actually have some of the same sonic tones as Zimmer's score for The Thin Red Line (1998).

The Son Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bringing THE SON to the Screen (10:40, 1080p) - this EPK featurette from Sony contains B-roll footage of The Son's production, film clips, and interviews with director/producer/co-writer Florian Zeller, co-writer Christopher Hampton, producer Iain Canning, producer Joanna Laurie, production designer Simon Bowles, as well as actors Laura Dern, Hugh Jackman, Vanessa Kirby, and Zen McGrath. All footage is shown in 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen. WARNING: Don't play this featurette if you've never seen The Son as it delivers a huge spoiler! All interviewees speak in English, with optional subtitles in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, and Thai.

• Theatrical Trailer (1:58, 1080p) - Sony's original trailer for The Son which appears in 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen (mean video bitrate: 18006 kbps) and comes with a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track (192 kbps).

• Bonus Previews - trailers for the Sony Pictures Classics titles The Father, The Duke, Mothering Sunday, The Phantom of the Open, and Living.

The Son Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Son is a cheerless picture that feature several dramatic-heavy performances and intense monologues. It isn't the probing study of mental health that it could have been. A better film with a similar subject that tells a far different story from another era is Marisa Silver's Permanent Record (1988), which I'd highly recommend. (When is Paramount going to at least produce a Blu-ray of this forgotten teen drama?) Sony delivers a stellar transfer and a very solid DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. To my knowledge, The Son isn't available on 4K in any format. I doubt that a 2160p presentation could do much for this film's visuals. The Blu-ray is more than adequate. A MILD RECOMMENDATION for The Son.