My Son (2022)

My Son felt like two films in one. On the one hand it started out as a fascinating rumination on an absentee father's grief and guilt after his son disappears. The film seemed to be going in an interesting direction exploring his feelings and responsibilities. However the film then morphed rather abruptly into a Liam Neeson style rescue film which was not nearly as engaging and dropped nearly all context related to the former. 

McAvoy and Foy had a fascinating dynamic going on as the film played with the difficult emotions around separated parents' struggling with a missing child. I was all set for a hard hitting drama about loss, about sacrifice, about the way we abdicate our responsibilities and our guilt over that. But the film only got so far down the road.

Spoiler: McAvoy's character discovers the child has been kidnapped by a child sex trafficking ring and goes on a quest to rescue him, which Foy eventually joins him on. The film does a decent job of making this rather unrealistic action saga emerge from the first drama, and uses the beginning as dad's motivation for his pursuit at all costs approach to rescuing his son. But it just becomes something else and looses a lot of what made it interesting for me before this point. 

To be fair the film handles its unrealistic plot (by unrealistic I mean the parents being the action hero saviours, not child trafficking which is unfortunately real) as well as can be expected but it still falls into a different category of film than the first half. I was way more interested in the first. But I didn't not enjoy the second. It ended up being a satisfying and tense thriller. 

The problem for me is the incongruity. The second requires a more distanced, suspension of disbelief approach to watching the film while the first requires a strap-yourself-in-this-will-be-emotionally-wrecking kind of approach. It was just jarring to go between them. I think i would have enjoyed both movies separately for different reasons. Together they feel like a mismatch.   

My Son

Starring: James McAvoy, Claire Foy, Gary Lewis

Director: Christian Carion

Writers: Laurie Irmann, Christian Carion