Mark Reviews Movies: SON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 4, 2021

There isn't as big a mystery about what's going on in Son as writer/director Ivan Kavanagh seems to believe. The mystery, thankfully, isn't the point of this chilling and occasionally gruesome piece of horror about paranoia, a baffling illness, decades-old trauma, and a mother's love for her son compelling her into performing some pretty grisly deeds. It's a moody, effective film, made all the more unsettling because of its pained but genuine heart.

It opens with Laura (Andi Matichak) on the run from something, someone, or a group of people. She's pregnant, we learn, as we see her quickly leave a diner in the middle of nowhere. Some quiet but laser-focused men have arrived, sitting right behind her or keeping a close eye on her every move. As she flees, the labor pains become too much, and Laura pulls over to the side of the road, screaming that she doesn't want this baby but staring with instant, unconditional love into her son's face as she holds him in her arms.

Eight years later, Laura has an ordinary, suburban life with her son David (Luke David Blumm). The two talk and laugh. They have dinner together with pleasant conversation. Everything seems ideal.

One night, though, Laura hears a door opening and some footsteps in the hall outside her bedroom. It's David, she assumes, getting up to use the bathroom or something. She calls. There's no answer. She gets up to look, and there's no one in the hall. David's bedroom door is closed, and the bathroom is empty.

Kavanagh isn't blatantly playing a trick on us, in that this little sequence has none of the hallmarks of what we might expect from the build-up to a big scare. There's no ominous music. The sounds of a door creaking, stirring, and footfalls are the only things breaking the complete silence. The director keeps the camera still, in a long shot of Laura in her bedroom, of another looking down the hall, and of the empty bathroom. The rhythm of Robin Hill's editing is so relaxed that, even knowing that something or someone other than Laura and David are somewhere in this house (because, of course, someone or something else has to be here), we're almost subconsciously lulled into a sense of security.

In other words, Kavanagh is playing a big trick on us, but he does so with such counter-intuitiveness and subtlety that the payoff is a genuine shock. It'd be unfair to give it away, really, because, while we're anticipating something, the actual image of what Laura finds behind a door immediately raises the story's stakes and gives us a sense of something sinister working its ways in background of the lives of these characters. It's so grounded in some real fear, though, that Laura can and does call the cops to figure out what had happened.

The detective on her case is Paul (Emile Hirsch), a by-the-books but kind guy who's genuinely concerned for the shock Laura experienced. He can't find any sign of the someone or something in the house, but he keeps a close eye on Laura and David, even coming by to check on them and ask a few late-night follow-up questions. Having returned downstairs after going to bed, David mentions that he feels ill. The boy proceeds to vomit an absolutely unnatural amount of blood on to the floor. Any amount, of course, isn't natural, but this is much more than even that.

The rest of the film, which takes us in several directions that we'd never anticipate from the enigmatic prologue or the initial ordinariness or even the dual shocks of uninvited in the house and the projectile vomit, is surprisingly ambitious for its relative simplicity. It deals with David's illness, of which the doctors cannot determine a cause and from which the boy recovers with inexplicable suddenness, and Laura's feelings of helplessness in protecting her son from something so awful.

It confronts the reason we saw Laura on the run in that prologue, having to do, not only with horrific abuse at the hands of her father, but also with the possibility that she was once part of a cult with some evil, otherworldly beliefs. While Laura takes her son on a trip toward her terrible past in the hope of finding some way to stop his illness, Paul and his partner Steve (Cranston Johnson) try to uncover the truth—whether the cult exists or if Laura's beliefs are merely a false, psychological manifestation of her very real trauma.

Given certain things about David's sickness (not to mention the dreadful, if temporary, cure to his symptoms), the mystery of Laura's past isn't much of a question. The kid is really sick, with medical experts to back it up, and driven by that illness to do what he does—with his mother's help, eventually. Laura's drive—to protect her son and provide whatever relief she can for him, no matter what she has to do to deliver that—is what grounds this film, despite its suggestions of the supernatural and its quite bloody scenes of David's "treatments."

Matichak's performance helps to maintain the film's emotional core, while Kavanagh goes about finding new, gory, and disturbing ways to surprise us. That balance works. We're invested in these characters, undergoing some very real pain and doubt amidst the hidden and direct horrors of the story, and we're as surprised by Kavangh's sincerity regarding the central relationship of Son as we are by the constant stream of plot turns and, of course, blood.

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