Only when Anthony Hopkins shows up does disaster drama ‘The Son’ break free from the otherwise predictable pattern ★★★☆☆

Can a single beautifully acted scene both elevate and hinder a film? With Sir Anthony Hopkins you can. The 84-year-old maestro only pops up once The Sono, as the father of Peter (Hugh Jackman). And we have already seen this long-grown son, a workaholic New York lawyer, struggling with his own fatherhood for half a movie. Because Peter’s teenage son does not make contact with peers, is full of reproaches for his divorced father, engages in self-mutilation and becomes more and more unreachable.

Peter resigns an offered top position after all, because of the concern for his son. And seeks confirmation – or co-blame – from his own successful and absent father, but he blows him away: your daddy wasn’t nice to you, so what? Just fucking get over it! It is the only moment when the tragedy of fate by writer and (stage) director Florian Zeller (43) briefly breaks free from the otherwise fixed and predictable pattern full of classically deployed menace (ah, a gun in the house). Hopkins soaks up the part and the scene: so villainous, so true. A mini-masterclass in acting, in which the acting of Jackman and Laura Dern (as Peter’s ex-wife) is somewhat Mannerist.

The Sono is the second part of Florian Zeller’s theater trilogy (The Mother, The Father, The Sono) that the director himself filmed. Of The Father, in which he very cunningly drew the viewer into the misty vortex of dementia by constantly changing the decor, the Frenchman experienced a dream feature film debut: Oscars for best script and lead actor Hopkins. Where The Father won something in the transformation to film, remains the form of The Sono theatrical, or even somewhat bare.

That doesn’t diminish the underlying drama. Zeller poignantly weaves the impotence of the parents through the scenario: how Peter catches up, tries to reinvent himself – or pretend to be a suitable father. Meanwhile, son Nicholas (a convincing Zen McGrath) also slips into something of a double role: he pretends to be a little better, then seems to want to protect his parents from his deeply felt despair and life fatigue. The viewer immediately sees through it. But the thump arrives nonetheless.