Nine years after (literal) cult thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, writer-director Sean Durkin returns with an equally challenging if completely different story. A neatly wrought chamber piece, The Nest is Marriage Story meets Escape To The Chateau, a piercing portrait of the breakdown of a relationship within the rooms and corridors of a huge manor house. Graced by perfectly modulated performances by Jude Law and, especially, The Leftovers’ Carrie Coon, it’s a film that eschews conventional storytelling in favour of a sophisticated, more elliptical approach that skewers subjects as diverse as male ego, class and the best way to get rid of a dead horse. It certainly requires patience, but offers bountiful rewards.
The Nest is set in the mid-’80s but opens like a ’90s thriller, with a wealthy family living in a huge American house, two cars in the garage, an espresso machine, the whole bit (a string score by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry underscores danger). It looks like the model family: English dad Rory O’Hara (Law), American mom Allison (Coon), ten-year-old son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) and Rory’s teen step-daughter Sam (Oona Roche). For all the moneyed good taste, Durkin infuses it with unease that belies the ideal of a happy unit. When Rory announces the family are upping sticks to England, the film finds another means to amplify the relationship cracks: a massive, slightly run-down country manor in Surrey that Rory proudly announces played home to Led Zeppelin recording an album. They might as well be living in The Overlook Hotel.
Carrie Coon is The Nest's MVP.
If you are looking for conventional storytelling with plot beats and turning points, then The Nest is not for you. Instead, Durkin, who flitted between the US and England as a child, accumulates a number of domestic vignettes that slowly build into a gripping portrait of a marriage in crisis. As it goes on, each scene becomes more compelling than the last: a dinner in which Allison calls Rory out for bullshitting about how good Anthony Hopkins is at the National Theatre; Rory visiting his mum (Anne Reid) on a council estate, or being schooled in life lessons by a mini-cab driver (James Nelson-Joyce).
Tapping into the darker edges of his persona, Law is terrific as Rory, a man from a shitty background who has pulled himself up so far he only operates on a higher level of bullshit. But it is Coon who is The Nest’s MVP. In her skilful hands, the initially disillusioned Allison grows in stature, becoming the dominant force in the relationship as the movie goes on — watching Coon swig wine straight from the bottle in a posh restaurant (“You’re embarrassing”, “And you’re exhausting”), let loose in a nightclub to The Communards’ ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ or losing her shit in a last-act meltdown is electrifying. But sometimes it’s just a close-up of her face, with the life ebbing away, that hits hardest. A masterclass.
