The cracks appear the more you look and you get a lot of time to look. Rory is a lifelong bullshitter who has occasionally struck it lucky but thinks his charm is unbeatable. When he feels a little pushback he sheds a few decades of emotional development and starts screaming and whining about betrayal like Donald Trump. Back at the ranch the daughter Sam is learning local fun and truancy, far from her American disciplined gymnastics, son Ben is getting bullied and Alison seems to be losing form, briefly brightened by the appearance of the horse upon whose rock she'll build a school. No one is saying it but no one wants this life and as Rory continues his campaign of flamboyant losing those cracks are getting existentially dangerous.
It's vital that this story be told in the '80s when Ronald Reagan was selling the poverty creating lie of trickle down, Thatcher was denying all but the richest of her constituents the very notion that they lived in a society, Australian billionaires were being hailed as popular heroes where they'd always just been ridiculed in egalitarian fervour. Even in pop music the great flavourless mainstream was swallowing all that had been original about post punk and crapping it out as pitch perfect lollies. Rory, venal and savage in the ice blue walls of his London offices, is just another purse snatcher from the second age of the velociraptor. His estranged mother has to think of who has turned up at her doorstep when he visits and has no interest in meeting the family he's built, staying at their splendid mansion or even having the conversation they are having. It's as though he is a polaroid turning up in the post of her younger self vomiting at a party.
If that sounds colder than you like then meet this film. That's what you get for almost two hours of screen time. It does help that it is so handsomely shot and that the bit about '80s music above is given more than lip service and mostly it helps that the performances are top shelf. Jude Law, who I've only ever been able to see as a golden sleaze is here amping up his gab in fine form but it is Carrie Coon who bears this film's burden. While she accepts that her Alison is doomed (like everyone on screen) to be unlovable she shows us how that arose in her character and the question of how she not just fell for Rory's bullshit but persisted with it is answered in her cultivation of the genuine pleasures that this veneered life can present. Equally credible in glamour wear and mucking out fatigues we watch a woman driven to a raw resignation to the point where change must occur and it must be from her. If you sit through this you will be waiting for her to appear on screen again as the film loses its life without her.
Otherwise, it's worth noting how this same film created two different impressions in me and my companion. I knew the director had made the ugly-creepy story about a cult escapee Martha Macy May Marlene and noted that the trailer made it look like an equally intense thriller. My friend had avoided the trailer and just watched the movie as it rolled out before her without waiting for something sharp to happen. She had the better time with it. The Nest is not a thriller by any stretch and shouldn't be marketed as such. It is a slow burn fable from the age of greed that has much to tell us as we emerge from the sobering stasis of plague and head back into a world where we might appreciate our better qualities. If this piece does take a little too long to say that while never really peaking then maybe it is as well because we will be living it soon ourselves at an even slower pace.
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