Son – review

Director: Ivan Kavanagh

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

If I had to sum Son up it would be a film that takes its beat from what we might guess happened, postpartum and post film, to Rosemary’s Baby. There has been commentary I’ve seen that suggests the film plays with whether the events are all in the protagonist’s head and I do see that but even on first watch I was fairly much of the opinion all the way through that she is experiencing the events and they are not a psychotic hallucination.

I did consider whether this should be cast as a vampire film or whether it just used tropes from the genre. All in all the events are certainly vampiric – you might disagree but you can’t escape the use of tropes.

in the diner

The film starts, after views from a windshield driving through torrential rain, in a diner with a woman – at this point in her life called Anna but through the majority of the film going by the name Laura (Andi Matichak) – whose feet are naked and muddy. Two men enter, sitting at different tables one directly behind her. She gets up, holding her heavily pregnant belly, and leaves. The men follow. She drives off the road and into a field, the rain still torrential, her labour started. What happened with the men is never shown. She tries to will the baby not to come, she doesn’t want it, but is soon holding her baby son.

idyllic

Cut forward 8 years and Laura is leaving the house with son David (Luke David Blumm), over the road neighbour Susan (Erin Bradley Dangar) says Hi and Laura checks she is still ok to have him after school. The banter between son and mother is friendly and amusing to them both, she drops him at school and goes to her job as a teacher; she is late that evening as she is doing a course herself in childhood PTSD. She collects him from Susan’s but little does she know that is the last idyllic day.

home invaders

She is sat on her bed, working on a file, when she hears movement. Thinking it is David she calls out but doesn’t get a response. She goes to his room, opens the door and there are people stood round the bad – the door slams shut and she can’t get in. She runs out of the house screaming for help, gets to Susan’s and asks her to call 911 and goes back to the house. Inside she gets to David’s room but no-one is there, David is led across the bed naked. The cops come but can find no trace of forced entry. One, Steve (Cranston Johnson), doesn’t believe her but his partner Paul (Emile Hirsch) is more sympathetic.

rash

A day passes. Paul visits her to say they found no prints other than the expected. David complains of not feeling great, but Laura points out he hasn’t eaten. That night, when she thinks she notices a prowler, she calls Paul. He can find no one but David comes downstairs unwell and vomits blood. At hospital, when they cut his pjs away has a virulent rash that is opening to sores. They don’t know what is wrong with him and tell Laura to expect the worst. She sleeps by his bed, in scrubs, but awakens to find he has blood at his mouth and calls out for help. Cut to the morning and it is as though nothing is wrong with him.

satisfying the hunger

Abandoning the blow-by-blow suffice to say that David continues to not eat, despite appearing well, and by the evening has become ill again (having seizures and regaining the rash). Laura has told Paul she escaped a cult (the official version is that she escaped a paedophile ring run by her father) and believes there is a cultish conspiracy with the hospital, so goes on the run with David. One thing that was not explained was, after the escape from the cult and subsequent birth, what became of David during the time that she was placed into a psychiatric facility. She quickly discovers that David, when ill, becomes ravenous for human flesh and that eating it cures his illness and clears his skin up.

prowling

This is our vampiric element – the need to consume flesh and blood, a ravenous hunger and an inability to imbibe normal food. Without feeding there is illness, when the hunger overcomes him his strength is prodigious (we see him take down a large man (David Kallaway, Angel & Gothic Harvest) and he is only 8) and he becomes angry and the opposite of the loving son he normally is – for instance shouting “Give me some F*cking food, you bitch”. Laura becomes convinced he was conceived with a demon and that his new state was triggered by the cult (in his bedroom) and they must have given him flesh to eat (trope-wise this fits with the type of lore when a feed sets a new turn's vampiric nature).

holding vigil

The film is fun. There are some twists (though mostly the beats follow as you would expect) but even on a second viewing it manages to maintain interest well. There is a certain rhythm that reminded me a tad of Angel Heart (though not nearly as powerful as that film). The plaudits must go to Luke David Blumm who does really well, especially with the more physical acting but also by feeling really natural with dialogue and Andi Matichak who does all the heavy lifting for the film. The Blu-Ray release has a brief set of interviews with cast and crew and deleted scenes. Those deleted scenes give a lot more background to Laura’s escape from the cult but were rightly deleted as I can only imagine them snarling the pace. That pace is what keeps the film interesting and is integral. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK