Like the recent A Vigilante, My Son is an arthouse thriller that seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered, and by eliding essential narrative connective tissue in the name of “ambiguity.” In each film, few ideas run beneath the portentously drab atmospherics—in each case, conventionally exciting filmmaking, in which thriller scenarios are actually milked for suspense, would be more honest than the inchoate emotional noodling that’s offered up instead.
My Son has exactly one idea, which it quickly squanders. A little boy named Mathys (Lino Papa) has been kidnapped from a camp out in the wilderness, reigniting buried tensions between his divorced parents, Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Marie (Mélanie Laurent). Julien is a perennially absent father who does mysterious work abroad (in a decent thriller this information would matter, but it doesn’t factor here at all), and Marie resents that he now suddenly wishes to play the role of grieving super-dad. Out of guilt, Julien overcompensates for his absence by assuming an overzealous vigilante role in the search for Mathys, first beating up Marie’s new boyfriend, Grégoire (Olivier de Benoist), and then playing detective. Initially, then, there’s a suggestion that Julien might wreak nearly as much havoc as the villains he’s attempting to find, as a selfish way of attempting to atone for his selfishness.
That’s a potentially great concept, suggesting Taken by way of O. Henry. But writer-director Christian Carion doesn’t see this possibility through. My Son peaks when Julien assaults Grégoire, as the fight convincingly erupts out of Julien’s bitterness, in which he works out resentments under the guise of playing the avenger. Not long after that encounter, however, Carion begins to take Julien’s delusions at face value, and so a portrait of an absent father becomes another redemption fable. The last hour of My Son could be Julien’s fantasy as he sleeps in a jail cell after his incident with Grégoire, though it isn’t.
As Julien closes in on the bad guys, whom he discovers in a chilling one-in-a-million coincidence, Marie and Grégoire are forgotten, as they’re inconvenient to Julien’s re-assertion of his role as a father. Taken was every bit as dumb, macho, and calculated, but it had the good sense to own those qualities, offering a nastily ecstatic orgy of carnage. Meanwhile, My Son lingers for long stretches on Julien driving, and then on Julien surveying a remote hunting ground. As with many self-conscious boutique thrillers, the climax is rushed and unsatisfying, so as to spare us from submitting ourselves to the base pleasures of kinetic excitement.
Carion is so indifferent to the particulars of his narrative that he doesn’t even tell us what happened to the bad guys, or why they were kidnapping children in the first place. Julien’s punishment is also implied but also rendered beside the point, especially as we see that he’s managed to win back Marie’s respect. At the end of My Son, Mathys anticipates a visit with his father in prison, his own traumatic experience as a kidnapped child apparently also forgotten, so that Julien’s self-absorption may once again be gratified.
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