By Jake Wilson
THE NEST ★★★½
Rated M, 107 minutes, in selected cinemas
It’s been roughly a decade since the American indie thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman trapped in a cult, showed the world which of the Olsen sisters can act. Since then, we’ve seen a good deal of that film’s star Elizabeth Olsen, who can currently be found on the small screen in WandaVision. But Sean Durkin, the film’s Canadian writer-director, has been much less visible.
Carrie Coon and Jude Law star in The Nest.
The silver lining is that he’s had a good deal of time to mull things over. Durkin’s long-awaited second feature, The Nest, is not adapted from a novel but it seems like it could have been, in part because he plainly knows much more about his characters than he chooses to reveal: the story is told through a series of vignettes that often end abruptly, with crucial events kept offscreen.
The backdrop is the world of commodities trading in the 1980s, on the eve of an era of deregulation that will spell doom for smaller companies and a feeding frenzy for their larger rivals. The go-getting Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a minnow in this pond, even if we accept his claim that he was once, briefly, a millionaire.
When we first meet him, Rory is living with his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon) and their two children (Oona Roche and Charlie Shotwell) in upstate New York, where Allison raises horses. As far as we can judge, their life is prosperously middle-class – but for the ambitious Rory, that’s nowhere near enough.
To Allison’s dismay, he insists on dragging his family back to London, where he reconnects with his shrewdly cynical former boss (Michael Culkin, who could play a credible Alfred Hitchcock) and rents a huge, rundown manor in Surrey: red brick on the outside, dark wood within.
This house is a character in its own right: a symbol of Rory’s pretensions, and of a dream of affluence which almost immediately becomes a nightmare. While The Nest is basically a character piece, it has the vibe of a thriller or even a horror film. The oppressive main location has everything to do with this, especially when wide shots reduce the characters to tiny figures at the bottom of the screen.
Shallowness is not the only thing Law can convey as an actor, but he certainly has a knack for it. Rory is like a middle-aged version of the yuppie played by Law in the 2004 comedy I Heart Huckabees: a grinning, gesticulating salesman whose mechanism for charming people runs out of control.
Rory is genuinely charismatic, not a born loser like, say, William H. Macy’s character in Fargo. Still, the laws of drama guarantee that he’ll be hit with one catastrophe after another, and that the worse things get, the more desperately he’ll insist that everything is fine.
The Nest has the creepy, oppressive vibe of a thriller or horror film. Credit: AP
Allison is a bit out of control, too. One of the first things we learn about her is that she’s the kind of person who reaches for a cigarette the moment she wakes up. But it’s a strength of Coon’s excellent performance that she doesn’t give us an easy way of summarising the character. Out in public, she can be glamorous in a rather impersonal way. Rory describes her as “my beautiful blonde American wife”, and we realise this is in part how he sees her, as a prize on his arm.
In private she seems to go into retreat, especially once she’s stranded in the old dark house, wrapped in loose knitwear meant to protect her against the British cold. Gradually, we realise we are witnessing a mental breakdown in slow motion, though in the power struggle between husband and wife it’s far from guaranteed who ultimately has the upper hand.
The Nest is not a flawless film. Some visual devices are repeated a few times too often, Durkin’s ear for period dialogue is not infallible, and viewers may find themselves debating the merits of the ending, which for me doesn’t entirely deliver on the promise of what has come before.
But it’s more adult, absorbing and carefully made than most current releases, and the central subject – how a preoccupation with status or material success can lead to disaster – may well feel uncomfortably close to home.