Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Son’ on Netflix, an Argentinian Thriller that Stokes the Existential Fears of Fatherhood

Another new international offering from Netflix, The Son is an Argentinian thriller ripe to be buried forever in the streaming service’s sub-menus. It deserves better. Based on Guillermo Martinez’s novel Una madre protectora (The Protective Mother), the film’s narrative engine is fueled by a sackful of universal existential fears about fatherhood, and gnaws on your nerves like a beaver to a succulent pine tree.

THE SON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lorenzo (Joaquin Furriel) gets the attic. Sigrid (Heidi Toini) gets the basement. He’s Argentinian, an artist, the type who sets a giant canvas on the floor and makes a big mess, smearing and splattering paint everywhere. She’s Norwegian, a biologist specializing in echinoderms, and her home laboratory is lined with glass bottles filled with starfish, sea urchins and other squidgy undersea things. She’s a decade or two younger than him; they met and married quickly, and hope to have a child soon.

Lorenzo introduces his new wife to an old friend, Renato (Luciano Caceres), who’s married to Lorenzo’s former student and lover, Julieta (Martina Gusman), now an attorney. Renato has one of Lorenzo’s paintings in his house — a Francisco Goya-inspired work in which a man is eating a headless baby. Neat! We learn that Lorenzo’s first marriage crashed and burned, and he’s estranged from his daughters. We also know Renato and Julieta have been struggling to conceive, and are undergoing fertility treatments.

The narrative jumps ahead months, maybe a year. Julieta bails a physically battered Lorenzo out of jail and acts as his legal representation; a psychiatrist diagnoses him with Capgras syndrome, because Lorenzo believes “a close relative has been substituted with an identical imposter.” Hmm. We jump back in time again: Sigrid is several months pregnant. She doesn’t trust obstetricians. She performs medical tests on herself. She injects her belly with medication, while Lorenzo watches from the attic through a rifle scope (yikes!). She hires a live-in midwife, a grim Old World woman named Gudrum (Regina Lamm), and Lorenzo sits puzzled as they speak to each other in Norwegian.

If this scenario seems Not Right, the acute, ominous score confirms it. When their son, Henrik, is born, Lorenzo is locked out of the room, listening to his wife’s horrifying moaning on the other side of the wall as a rumbling and crackling thunderstorm amplifies the tension. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Perhaps it’s not a spoiler to say they don’t live happily ever after as a sweet, loving family.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Director Sebastian Schindel drinks from the same dark, polluted psycho-well as art-horror auteurs Darren Aronofsky and Yorgos Lanthimos — and The Son blends the frustration and dread of the former’s Mother! with a bit of the surreal sci-fi weirdness of the latter’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The Son isn’t nearly as harrowing as either, though, for better or worse.

Performance Worth Watching: As Lorenzo, Furriel anchors the picture with a fascinatingly fraught performance that keeps us wondering whether the character’s extreme paranoia is justified or not.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’m a biologist. I ran all my tests myself,” Sigrid says to the third in a long line of rejected obstetricians, before hiring a midwife who looks imported from the infant-sacrifice scene in The VVitch.

Single Best Shot: Here’s a nifty shot of Sigrid’s lab tracking over all her creepy specimen bottles full of creepy primitive ocean creatures in creepy light that some paint manufacturer has probably already dubbed Clinical Blue. There’s absolutely nothing weird going on in this basement, nosirree. Move along!

Sex and Skin: The movie opens with a sweaty scene of baby Henrik being conceived, and proceeds to get less and less erotic with every passing moment.

Our Take: The Son can be pretty gripping: Guillermo Nieto’s cinematography is claustrophobic, screenwriter Leonel D’Agostino’s time-hopping narrative structure fosters intrigue and Schindel nurtures a grim, sometimes grimly comic, tone, like he’s a new mom tenderly breastfeeding her baby, or something. The film nods at everything from Rosemary’s Baby to Hereditary, but maintains its modesty. Its lack of overt visual flash keeps us focused intently on Lorenzo’s point-of-view, keeping the audience tuned tightly to his growing psychological dread.

Thematically, the movie’s reach exceeds its grasp a bit. Early on, Schindel establishes some visual symbolism in golden spiral/Fibonacci sequence imagery; inspired by Sigrid’s studies, Lorenzo paints massive nautilus shells, suggesting some kind of intellectual exploration of the marriage of art and science. It’s mostly a red herring, though. The film is much better at stoking gut-level fears of fathers who feel alienated and powerless in the presence of the deep psychological and biological bond between mother and child. Of course, the movie takes this concept to great extremes, and I’m not sure if it concludes with tantalizing suggestiveness or frustrating ambiguity.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Son had me laughing to break the tension, which is a good sign that it’s effectively getting under my skin. It’s a sturdy horror-thriller hybrid, slowly building suspense to a nerve-wracking conclusion.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Son on Netflix