A dark Surrey manor house gives its new American family a chilly welcome in Sean Durkin’s 80s-set ghost story cum emotional parable
Is it a ghost story? A parable of family dysfunction? Or perhaps a fever dream of neoliberalism’s troubled birth in the Thatcher-Reagan 80s and the special relationship of greed and good? Or is this rivetingly strange movie an adaptation of some 70s or 80s novel that we had somehow all forgotten about: something by Iris Murdoch, or maybe Piers Paul Read? The Nest’s director is film-maker Sean Durkin, his first since the intriguing quasi-Manson cult drama Martha Marcy May Marlene from 2011, and however much it feels like an adaptation, this is his own original screenplay – and very original.
The setting is the mid-1980s, with news about President Reagan on the radio and everyone smoking indoors, and the story begins in the handsome suburban home in upstate New York of Rory O’Hara, an expatriate Briton played by Jude Law. He has made a fortune as a commodity trader in Manhattan and one morning high-handedly tells his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon), stepdaughter Sam (Oona Roche) and young son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) that he has accepted a job offer from his old boss in the City of London. Restless, mercurial, fast-talking Rory evidently has a yen to return in triumph to his old stamping ground, and maybe cautiously reconnect with his glowering widowed mum – a terrifically potent cameo from Anne Reid.
