The Nest (2020)

Directed by: Sean Durkin | 107 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell, Tanya Allen, Tattiawna Jones, Marcus Cornwall, Wendy Crewson, Michael Culkin, Adeel Akhtar, Annabel Leventon, Peter Hamilton Dyer, Bamshad Abedi-Amin, Oliver Gatz

Filmmaker Sean Durkin was born in Canada in December 1981, but not long after moved to England, where he lived successively in North London and Kent. When he was twelve years old, the family moved back to the other side of the Atlantic, to Manhattan in New York to be precise. Moving back and forth between two continents made a deep impression on young Sean. Because unlike today, in the eighties there were still quite large cultural differences between the US and the UK/Europe. Durkin processed the impressions he gained at the time into his second feature film, after the much acclaimed ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ (2011). Where that film revolved around a woman who falls under the spell of a tyrannical cult leader and seems unable to escape from him, Durkin stays closer to home with ‘The Nest’ and now aims at the dark sides of the neoliberalism of the ‘ greedy eighties’.

When we meet the O’Hara family, in the second half of the eighties, they seem to have it all together in their lavish villa in the New York suburbs. Rory (Jude Law) makes his living on Wall Street and his wife Allison (Carrie Coon) runs her own riding school around the corner from their house. Sam (Oona Roche), Allison’s teenage daughter from a previous relationship, has an occasional foul mouth but gets along well with her mother and stepfather, as well as a close relationship with her 12-year-old half-brother Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell). But appearances can be deceiving: overnight Rory decides to move his family to England, where he is originally from. Wall Street is on the brink of collapse and across the pond he sees great financial opportunities. Allison is unwilling to give up her comfortable life in New York, but still gives in when even her own mother insists that the reason a woman gets married is because then she no longer has to make decisions herself. to take. Oh well, it’s the eighties, isn’t it?

The New Home of the O’Haras in England is an imposing 19th-century Gothic Revival mansion in Surrey, with a huge expanse of land surrounding it that offers Allison space to build stables and set up a new riding school. And while Sam and Benjamin try to settle in at their new school, Rory and Allison call in construction workers to get the riding school off the ground. “This is what we have always wanted,” Rory emphasizes. But for Rory, it soon turns out, it’s never enough. He is forced to keep up appearances, even when his old boss Arthur (Michael Culkin) decides not to do business with him and suddenly money stops coming into the O’Hara’s account. But Allison only finds out when she can’t afford the construction workers anymore, much to her frustration. Because Rory keeps pretending that everything is going well and the money is pouring in. The facade of wealth, opulence and success that Rory tries to keep up for as long as possible is crumbling visibly…

Sean Durkin has carried through that facade, that contradiction, on several fronts. Right in the first scene, when we look at that beautiful New York villa, he holds our attention for extra long with a long shot that is accompanied by melancholic, almost sad music by composer Richard Reed Parry (of the band Arcade Fire). . In addition to music, he also makes clever use of shadows and lighting, which give the Surrey mansion in particular an oppressive, uncomfortable and gloomy atmosphere. We’ve known since ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ that Durkin focuses on his characters rather than the plot and takes his actors to great heights. Law and Coon keep the emotions small, quiet and flat at first, only to work towards an emotional climax towards the end. The disadvantage of Durkin’s character-driven approach is that as a viewer you will miss the grip of a plot. Especially when it’s so hard to empathize with the characters because they are so cold and distant. If ‘The Nest’ had been a little more concrete and focused more on plot and less on style and atmosphere, the film would have had just that little bit more impact.