Like real estate, cinema is all about location, location, location. Writer-director Sean Durkin has picked the right one with The Nest, while his characters have most certainly picked the wrong one. Often feeling as though it were reverse-engineered around a deluxe location hookup in Durkin’s native England, The Nest wrings tension out of the cavernous hallways and stygian shadows of the countryside manor where white-collar stooge Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) has brought his family on the promise of a financial windfall.
Nearly every exactingly framed establishing shot in the film creeps toward the action at a snail’s pace, implying the presence of some malevolent force at work in the floorboards and walls themselves. But while the film adopts the semantics of a horror film, it’s really just a gussied-up domestic melodrama, its skewering of the father-knows-best ethos calling to mind midcentury classics like Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life or Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill.
The Nest is set in Ronald Reagan’s ’80s, a period whose individualist economic philosophies have polluted Rory’s brain to such a degree that the quaint slow-growth attitudes of his old-money colleagues in London start to look preferable by comparison. Having fallen hook, line, and sinker for the illusion of upward mobility after a stint in the American suburbs (where the film begins), the English-born Rory’s business ambitions lead him back to the exurbs of London, where he hopes that he can corner the market on globalizing prospects in the home country. His wife, Allison (Carrie Coon), a horse trainer who so gamely sees through her husband’s bullshit that it’s a bit hard to believe she keeps going along with it, hates the move at face value, and her immediate and increasing distaste of the ghoulish, Gothic-like property is telegraphed by the accelerating rate of her portentous chain smoking.
As in his acclaimed debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Durkin favors an aesthetic of frigid calculation reminiscent of the work of frequent collaborator Antonio Campos: a color palette evoking soil and pine overseen by German cinematographer Mátyás Erdély; close-ups used more for graphic punctuation than vicarious engagement; and hard-edged compositions that make pointed use of blurred negative space and vanishing points.
The narrative is unfurled as a volley between Rory’s exploits among the London financial elite and the unraveling order back at the homestead, with razor-sharp edits timed for maximum unease to bridge the two spheres. His disaffected teenage daughter, Samantha (Oona Roche), starts amassing enough cigarette butts to rival her mother when she realizes that she’s being shunned by Rory in favor of her docile younger brother, Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), who’s been enrolled in a fancy private school in a show of Daddy’s favoritism. Meanwhile, the neglected Allison escapes the pressure of her husband’s mounting debts by caring for her beloved horse—an outlet that’s cruelly vacated when the animal inexplicably drops dead.
Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth. More compelling are the diversions to London high-rises and white-tablecloth soirees, where Durkin, who grew up outside the city in the era depicted in the film, offers a caustic take on the fusty value system of the upper classes—which Rory first conforms to and later rebels against. The scenes between Law and Michael Culkin, playing Rory’s old stuck-in-his-ways boss, Arthur, alight with the sense of two actors energized by their combative material, with Law leaning into his knack for bratty selfishness as his character tries to strong-arm his steely superior into a deal that’s evidently not in his interest. Rory does a similarly groveling act when he entertains his associates at dinner parties, which gives Allison a chance to balk at her husband’s Janus-faced insincerity. Such scenes point toward a culture-clash black comedy that The Nest never fully embraces, as it’s too busy flirting with intimations of paranormal activity, from creepy silences to doors mysteriously opening.
Of course, these gestures toward otherworldliness aren’t an accident, but rather a considered metaphor, as the only thing haunting this family is their own internal strife. The figurative demons are exorcised in a histrionic third act that intercuts between three different breaking points: Samantha’s takeover of the house for a rowdy high school bash, Allison’s escape into London side streets to liquor up and dance away her frustration, and Rory’s dark night of the soul, a humiliating evening of failed transactions that finds him trudging down a dirt road at dawn in a tracking shot that quotes Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.
Durkin remains a filmmaker of clear skill and promise, but The Nest too often strains for effect, saddling the actors, especially Law, with groaner dialogue that underlines the story’s subtext. “I had a shitty childhood and I deserve this and I deserve a lot more,” hisses Rory when confronted by Allison on his delusions, reinforcing the already self-evident theme of this dreary morality tale: that worshiping wealth is an illness. Odds are good that the freaks who don’t already know that will not see this film.
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