When I first saw the new film The Nest (in theaters on September 18, available digitally November 17), it played as tragedy. All the way back at Sundance—a flickering memory from a distant, lost age—I regarded Sean Durkin’s stately, restrained work as a grim tale of economic ruin. Jude Law plays a scheming businessman, or perhaps conman, who moves his wife (Carrie Coon) and children (Oona Roche and Charlie Shotwell) back to his native England, with the plan to make a mint in the slowly modernizing London business sector. Things fall apart, the family fractures. I left the film chilled and anxious.
I watched it again this week, after months of so many real things falling apart, and the film played differently, to surprising effect. Its bleak mechanics were still there; Law’s Rory is still a shifty liar, Coon’s Allison still drowns in her own compromise, the kids Samantha and Benjamin still spin off into isolated neglect. But buried under all that—something unearthed by the end of Durkin’s exquisitely modulated film—is a weird, weary kind of hope. The family bottoms out, and will need to wrestle their way back up to the surface somehow. But still, they’re there, warts and resentments and all.
The Nest is a complex movie, despite its economical size. At initial glance, it is mostly just the story of a family moving, sort of for Dad’s job, and not finding what they like in their new environment. It’s not terribly far off from a great Simpsons episode about the same thing. But what Durkin does so smartly—as he did in his debut feature and most recent film, Martha Marcy May Marlene—is fill the picture with a creeping atmosphere that implies deeper, danker things beyond what we’re seeing in literal form.
At many points in The Nest, it seems possible that the film is going to become a haunted-house horror. Or maybe it will become the story of a confidence man’s awful comeuppance, a house of lies coming tumbling down terribly. Yet that’s all mere, and useful, genre suggestion. The Nest keeps calmly insisting that, sure things could go even screwier—but what we’re seeing is plenty bad, and plenty scary already.
Working with cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, Durkin casts his film into the dark. In some scenes, people speaking stand unlit, in shadows, just as they might in a real living room in a real crumbling English manor house while arguing about the survival of the family experiment. Durkin’s compositions are nervy and signature, but not showy. There’s no jazzy or audacious visual language to The Nest, though it is thrillingly assured. The film is a pleasure to look at even as it envelops its characters in gloom.
Law plays Rory as a charmer possessed of irksome, daredevil hubris. It’s plain to see how he can easily ingratiate himself into dealmaking jobs, promising windfalls for his superiors and cohorts. The fantasy he’s selling—classy but greedy, rapacious yet tastefully so—is appealing to the swells and suits he’s chatting up. But we also detect, because Law so carefully introduces it into the character, the sweaty, sorry motivation behind all his solicitous posturing. Rory isn’t quite pathetic; Durkin and Law rescue him from that. We’re repulsed by his lying and scrambling, yes, but frightfully understanding of it too.
It’s Coon, though, who commands the movie. What we learn of Allison’s backstory tells us that she came from a hardscrabble place. While she enjoys the trappings of her more comfortable pre-England life—she raises horses, teaches riding lessons, has an agreeable suburban home with a Mercedes in the driveway—she’s deeply suspicious of it too. Allison’s journey in the film is her growing distaste for the artifice, her anger and exhaustion at Rory’s furious peddling to maintain something that perhaps never felt fully real to Allison. Coon plays that tragedy, and strange triumph, with a forceful, watchful mettle. She’s breathtaking as she pitches Allison into a slow keen that turns into a howl of defiance. She’s worth the price of admission (or rental, I guess) alone.