Zeller's too smart to make a truly "bad" movie, and there are some interesting ideas here... But the messaging is so blunt, and the narrative descent so predictable, it leaves little room for actual emotional engagement.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 10, 2023

A badly misjudged melodrama, this domestic tale is bogged down in heavy handed histrionics and sentimental notes that makes you want to run away.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 20, 2023

There are no ill intentions behind The Son, but sometimes stories are so badly judged and naive in their execution that they turn ugly.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 18, 2023

Nicholas’s pain should overwhelm us. It doesn’t, because it’s not allowed to.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 17, 2023

Jackman resumes conveying psychic trauma with the air of someone thinking he might have lost his car keys. But it’s the film that has the character flaw no actor could redeem.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 16, 2023

Everything is a little too self-conscious, but the longer the film goes on — and it does rather go on — the more it seems this artifice might be a deliberate choice, to make the entire world as dishonest and uncomfortable as Nicholas sees it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 14, 2023

It’s plain torture, cruelly manipulative yet also hopelessly underwritten, once taken out of the theatre, into the light.

| Feb 10, 2023

The actors penetrate the murk to make something very touching out of their response to the tragedy which is threatening to derail all their lives.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 10, 2023

The Son is immaculately acted and staged.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2023

There’s no doubt that Zeller takes this subject seriously. But his conceptual skill isn’t matched by his writing of scenes. And the writing for Nicholas is particularly underwhelming.

| Jan 20, 2023

While it deals with topics such as depression and suicide head on, it handles them in a rather clunky manner, and comes off more like an after school special than a reasoned, serious drama.

| Original Score: C | Jan 20, 2023

Hugh Jackman acts his heart out as a parent unable to cope with his clinically depressed son, but even he can’t save this poor relation to The Father from descending into two hours of misery porn.

| Jan 20, 2023

With all the market research and focus groups that drive the movie world, it's rare for something as poorly conceived as "The Son" to make it through the cracks.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Jan 20, 2023

A disappointing melodrama with a twist ending that’s as predictable as it is egregious.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 20, 2023

Jackman can’t overcome an emotionally manipulative screenplay and an amateurish young co-star.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 20, 2023

Tears need to be earned, and The Son fails at that.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 18, 2023

Quite simply, a disappointment, from its pat setup to its equally false — and, quite frankly, cruel — resolution.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 18, 2023

The actors do good work.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2023

The Son is a film that is very cruel to its characters, and by extension to its long-suffering audience.

| Jan 17, 2023

It’s not often I watch a movie that feels downright irresponsible, but The Son has claimed that rare honor.

| Dec 22, 2022