Jude Law was announced as the star of Sean Durkin‘s (MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE) new film THE NEST, about a family on the verge of a breakdown under the pressure of greed and status anxiety in the 80s, but the film belongs to Carrie Coon. In this eerie drama, which is like a mixture of Ang Lee‘s THE ICE STORM and a haunted house tale, Coon plays Allison, the wife of a social climber, the very ambitious stockbroker Rory (Law), who slowly comes to realize that her husband‘s hunger for success is taking an increasingly toxic toll on her family‘s life. In one of the best acting performances of the year, Coon captures the anger of a woman who knows that the man that she loves has lost it. Whether she‘s defiantly smoking in the car,drinking coffee while singing “These Dreams“ by Heart, encountering the the upper-class snobs who treat her like “the wife of...“, ironically applauding, or making a scene at a restaurant: Coon‘s acting is an absolute tour de force. While Lee‘s THE ICE STORM uses the Watergate hearings and the budding sexual revolution in suburbia as the backdrop of his narrative about a dysfunctional family, here it‘s unfettered capitalism and yuppiedom that have a devastating influence on the family. THE NEST shows the slow decay of a marriage through the lense of the horror genre, which gives the film a dark tone. The spacious British property the family move into from the US, a narrative strand about Allison‘s horse, and the scary scenes with the couple‘s kids have an ominous atmosphere that constantly makes you feel that something awful is looming just under the surface. The perfectly paced tension stems from the question of how long Rory‘s farce of living way beyind his means can last before everything falls apart – and whether anything will remain beneath the ruins that is worth saving.

Jared Abbot (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy