A RAT’S NEST
Family and capitalism come under scrutiny, writes Tymon Smith
It’s been a decade since writer/director Sean Durkin made critical waves with his debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene, a claustrophobic psychological drama about a paranoid cult survivor. His long-awaited second feature continues his preoccupation with how to convey the sense of emotional dislocation and ennui through careful control of the basic techniques of cinema.
The Nest is almost many things but never quite what you think. A ghost story with no ghosts; a quietly devastating and effective critique of the emptiness at the heart of freemarket capitalist enterprise with none of the over-the-top, baroque, cocaine-snorting excess of The Wolf of Wall Street; and a depressing, real dissection of family that never sinks anywhere near the depths of mawkish sentimentalism that characterises similar themed dramas.
The film is set in the get-rich, chainsmoking, free-for-all of 1980s-era Reagan trickle-down economics. It’s the story of Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), a British self-made financial market entrepreneur who, for no apparent reason, informs his horse-trainer wife, Allison (Carrie Coon), that he’s decided Thatcher’s London is the place to be and it’s time to uproot the family from their idyllic upstate New York estate.
When Allison and her two children, teenage wildling Sam (Oona Roche) and quiet football-loving Ben (Charlie Shotwell) arrive in England, they’re met by a smugly satisfied Rory at the entrance to their new home — a palatial Surrey estate where, he proudly tells them, “Led Zeppelin once recorded an album”, and which is worryingly too large and too quietly creepy for Allison’s liking.
Rory quickly demonstrates himself to be a typical big-talking braggart with a foolish belief in the market to deliver him the trappings of success that he claims in conversation but doesn’t really have the money in the bank to support. His smokeand-mirrors shenanigans soon tire Allison, whose personal stash of rainy-day cash swiftly vanishes as her husband’s grand plans are crushed by the realities of a world in which there’s plenty of talk but very little commitment.
As the emptiness and exhaustion of all this pretence begins to hit home, everyone slowly and subtly starts to tilt dangerously off their psychological axes. As Rory’s boss, Arthur Davis, tells him pointedly in one scene, “You never paid attention to the details,” and Rory and the O’Haras soon discover that it’s in the details that something devilish lurks.
There are constant intimations of the kind of show-don’t-tell chills offered by classic Turn of the Screw horror, but, like the family, we never see anything, even though we feel that everything is going very, very wrong.
By the time we reach the very downbeat but carefully executed conclusion, we’re left with a deep sense of unease at the horrific realisation that the emptiness of the world they thought they were masters of has always been there patiently waiting to swallow them up.
Law gives his usual square-jawed charm a nasty, brutish bite that perfectly serves Rory’s character as a man who is trapped in a maze of false walls and dead ends.
Coon is excellent in her role as the softspoken on the outside (but boiling angrily on the inside) Allison who, in the roll of an eye or the exhale of a puff of cigarette smoke, signals to her husband and us that she’s not falling for his schtick.
Tautly and intelligently shot by Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, hauntingly scored by Richard Reed Perry and always masterfully controlled with a keen eye for insinuation rather than revelation by Durkin, it’s a deeply unsettling and intriguing drama that keeps you on the edge of your seat without letting you know exactly why it’s all so fascinating, scary and terrifying.
The nest here is not a comfortable, snug retreat from the banalities of the outside workaday world but a hell-hole of increasingly inescapable psychological trauma that the outside world brings home and which, from an outsider’s perspective, should be simple enough to escape but from the inside is impossible to see beyond.
That’s as fitting a metaphor for the pitfalls of the capitalist dream as any we’ve seen on screen for a long time and it’s one whose emotional gut-punch leaves a long-lasting gasp.