The Nest

Directed by Sean Durkin

Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Jude Law and Carrie Coon star in The Nest

I watched The Nest in a fixed state of unease, shoulders tense and set forward even in a plush cinema seat, my mouth immediately drying out after each sip of my drink. Sean Durkin’s long-awaited second feature is a tense, quiet marital drama that I kept expecting to explode into an outright horror film, as if some baleful supernatural force would eventually reveal its role in this poisoned household’s unhappiness. At a certain point, I accepted that was not going to happen; I also realised it was a horror film anyway, and had been one all along.

But what’s so disquieting about the O’Hara family? They’re a seemingly close, clean-cut foursome; you might describe them as “normal” if their effortlessly displayed wealth doesn’t first make your eyes widen. Dad Rory (Jude Law) works in stocks and shares; mum Allison runs horseback-riding classes close to their suburban New York home. Ben (Charlie Shotwell), their 12-year-old son, and Sam (Oona Roche), Allison’s teenage daughter from a previous relationship, complete the well-adjusted picture.

But there’s something a little posed, a little unsettled, about this family’s bourgeois stability: when British-born Rory impulsively takes a new job in his homeland, Allison complains that it’s their fourth big move in a decade. Are they running from something, or toward something? And either way, will the vast Gothic-style manor house that Rory rents for them in Surrey — the kind of unhomely space that offers its residents more space to hide than to bond — be the sanctuary they need?

As in his debut, the eerie cult-deprogramming thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, Durkin doesn’t provide tidy answers or psychological maps to the root of his characters’ unrest. Rory’s emerging backstory doesn’t wholly explain his borderline-sociopathic packaging of his own identity; in his best, most cleverly cast role in eons, Law’s nervy, self-aware performance gestures at the kind of soulful void you might just be born with. The extraordinary Coon may be more clear-eyed and outwardly raging, but Allison, too, is a puzzle: we wonder whether marriage made her this discontented, or whether she unconsciously saw and sought Rory’s discontent to begin with. 

Late-‘80s capitalism — yes, The Nest is a period piece, though nothing about it feels untrue to the present — is the third partner in this union. It's the factor that allows them to keep running, to avoid facing themselves, while keeping their destination just out of view: behind the next pay raise, status property or pedigree horse. That’s the horror right there.

THE NEST (2020) Written by Sean Durkin | Shot by Mátyás Erdély | Edited by Matthew Hannam

In cinemas now.