Sean Durkin’s latest film shows the true faces of people and says things as they are, while their conflicts and uncertainties, oftentimes hidden behind appearances, come to the surface. The Nest is interested in the interactions between the members of a family and highlights the psychological processes that are put into motion by the changes they suffer after moving to England.

Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), a protective father and loving husband, yet not as charismatic when it comes to business, tries his hand once more in the field of entrepreneurship in his native country, and to make sure that his family will join him there, he convinces his wife (Carrie Coon as Allison, nicknamed Al) and charms their children (Samatha and Benjamin) with all sorts of promises. Everything that they will find upon their arrival – a huge mansion outside of London, on a plot of land that is just as enormous, an excellent school, everything is going to be perfect. Such a departure automatically implies that Rory must reassert himself in London’s business field, which he had left behind for more than a decade. It’s the eighties, a time when the English market is at a standstill, so what he has to do to secure his success is to convince his boss that his business plan will be successful. All said and done. If Rory O’Hara is truly capable of making something out of nothing, that’s harder to tell. What is certain is that his persuasiveness is a trump card, for the better part. For example, when he visits his mother after so many years, Rory tries to convince her that her return in his life would be very important. Even though things start losing their pace and even going downwards, his self-made man appearance, one that he’s tightly holding on to, gives him the impression that now, more than ever, he is finally worthy of showing himself in front of his mother. One of the film’s most vexing moments is the one in which Rory, lost in thought on the back seat of a cab, is asked what his job is by the driver. His answer, that all he does is to pretend that he is rich, could be taken as a key of interpretation to all this persuasiveness that he’s been trying to use in vain, not even managing to convince himself that he is (not) who he would like to be.

In opposition to him, persisting in this absurd game of self-mystification, we have Allison, who discovers in herself the fact that she can no longer pretend to be someone else without sweeping her true personality under the rug. Once she arrives in England, Al, an erstwhile protean character, whose occupation gave her a sense of meaning in life, lets herself be devoured and depersonalized by her surroundings and circumstances to the point of alienation.

Although far from being a feminist, Durkin tries to give credit (and freedom of expression) to Al. Rory dragged her after him to London, gave her access to a material world that he seems to wish for more than she does, takes her to bland dinners in the hopes that they would give off the impression of that couple which is at the gates of success; resilient, the woman tried to oppose him as much as she could. While she is losing herself, she is (re)discovering her husband. During hard times, other’s flaws become easier to spot. Especially his, who has the potential of being the scapegoat for all the family’s troubles. As she is seeing new faces of Rory’s personality, Allison becomes aware of who she truly is. She chooses to speak to her husband the way he deserves, and the way she feels like (sending him off with refreshing fuck yourself-s in the context of family dramas), she renounced her expensive furs, her manners, and small talk (asked what her job is at one of the dinners, the woman replies, not giving a damn about ulterior reactions: “I work on a farm, shoveling shit out of pigpens.”) Of the two, only she is willing to reveal her modest origins and to stop pretending that everything she has is a given, not something that was obtained at the intersection of the right time and place.

Speaking of places, the gigantic house (which they are barely able to afford, in fact) is the topos that, just as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, accumulates negative energies which it projects onto its inhabitants. This “Lucky Mill” (to cite Slavici) of the O’Haras, initially invested with the role of making them (or, especially Rory) feel like a part of the London bourgeoisie, creates divisions in what should have been unity. On the mansion’s isolated territory, each of them ends up living their drama. The dynamic nature of the first couple of scenes slowly loses itself while the rhythm of the four’s lives ends up misshapen. Jack’s writer’s block (in The Shining) is the equivalent of the father’s endeavors in business. Acting as a bond and somehow maintaining good spirits, in the first few dynamic scenes of their life in the United States, Rory is the one to take his kids to school and play with them. We still don’t see him in the role of a distant pater familias, one that is much too busy with work. Al was keeping up with her horse riding classes, and Sam hadn’t yet gone down the path of teenage parties. And although the narration doesn’t have any forbidden spaces (in the vein of Room 237), and Durkin keeps fantasy at bay (excluding the hallucinatory apparitions that can be found in Kubrick’s film), the feeling of an exasperation bordering on insanity is the same for all of the O’Haras and is similar to the one experienced by the protagonists in The Shining.

In The Nest, suspense is built up slower than usual. The question that makes one want to watch the film to the very end, born out of a constantly accumulating tension, is not “Are they going to make it in the end?”, but rather, “How much longer can they go like this?”. Thus, we are witnessing desperation but also catharsis, oftentimes from different positions, since the camera looks either at the plot in its entirety, either breathes down their necks, and its (slowed-down) zoom-ins help us better digest the information and to put two and two together, especially since we rarely see the four O’Haras together. One such moment is the final scene – for the first time in a long period, we have a breath of fresh air, just as the news of their departure seemed to be at the beginning of the film.

Drama pursues and ties together the four protagonists of Sean Durkin’s newest feature. Through the sincerity of its dialogues and the way in which its protagonists are made and unmade (especially Rory and Allison), along with the world in which they are moving around, Durkin constructs a Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple that is on the verge of starting a new life in the bodies of Coon and Law, who perfectly melt together for a short time, only for them to end up regarding each-other with unrepentant scorn once things start to go downhill.

Petra Torsan

Petra Torsan is a film student. She enjoys writing about and working on films. Her spiritual mentors have been (and still are) David Bowie, Anaïs Nin, and Jonas Mekas, to equal degrees.