The Nest (2020)
First screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Sean Durkin. Cast: Carrie Coon, Jude Law, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell, Michael Culkin, Adeel Akhtar, Anne Reid, Wendy Crewson. Screenplay: Sean Durkin. In Brief:
Durkin's formal and thematic trademarks reach a zenith of clarity as well as complexity. Great cast. Gripping throughout.
VOR:④
Skunked by its tiny mid-COVID release, this one's still getting discovered. Schema isn't all new but execution is fresh and nervy. Timely, too.
Here is the exact right way to watch The Nest, which is not a horror film but may as well be.
1. Go in knowing nothing about it, except that several people you love and respect think it's wonderful and underappreciated. I'm not implying there is some dramatic twist about which you're best left in the dark. Just that a movie this meticulously observant of behavior, this portentous in its anything-might-happen framing of space, and this carefully but unpredictably crafted in terms of story trajectory is best experienced in real time.
2. Start the movie at 11pm, when the only person you live with is already asleep and all the lights are out. Sit close-ish to your TV and wear earbuds, both to respect the sleeper in the next room and for escalated immersion in whatever's about to transpire.
3. Right as you're about to start, get an alert from your weather app that an intense thunderstorm is likely to form on top of you in about 54 minutes. As The Nest begins in its spidery fashion, steel-cut and mostly wordless for its opening stretch, allow the enviably plush but subtly tense environment on screen to exist in luminous counterpoint to the pitch blackness in which you're watching. Allow the spectacle to be further contextualized by brief but absolutely massive flickers of silent, tremendously bright, full-sky lightning. Never once think about your phone again for the next two hours.
4. About half an hour in, ponder the relocation in the movie that has greatly gratified one of our four immaculately played leads, destabilized two others, and had a less certain impact on the fourth. Sit at full attention during a black-tie dinner party sequence where an important "fact" gets exposed as an untruth, meaningless and imperceptible to anyone in the crowd except the person it most affects, who says nothing across an extended, Kidman-in-Birth close-up about this small but stark revelation. In fact, she says nothing ever about this particular, life-altering infraction, because this screenplay is utterly disinclined to spell out the obvious. At this moment, notice that the lightning outside has escalated even further, such that the midnight sky is radiant as often as it is dark, yielding rhythmic, sinister, high-resolution X-rays of about a dozen dark-grey cloud silhouettes every few seconds. These clouds are utterly invisible when the lightning isn't flashing, but they are both expanding and moving closer.
5. Be a child of the 80s, so that an increasingly taut experience of spoken and unspoken conflict is occasionally punctuated by snippets of "These Dreams" or "Hold Me Now" or "Holding Back the Years," mixed not as ostentatious needle-drops but in the personality- and location-specific ways we all hear music in our actual lives. Relish the era-defining but rarely filmed reflex of an 80s teenager darting to a boom box to hit Record on her at-the-ready blank cassette in Tape Deck B, to capture a song on the radio that she'd like to be able to hear again later, when the mood strikes.
6. Through an extended interval of parallel action that upends two different characters completely—unbeknownst to each other for now but with reciprocal implications for each—make sure the promised rainstorm finally hits, such that needles of water come flying through the barely-cracked window in the room where you're watching. The wind also starts rattling everything in the kitchen down the hall, which has the only window left wide open. Notice that rushing to shut that window and to rescue what's shaking on the sill counts as taking a breather from the steadily mounting, nonspecific dread in the film.
7. Make sure you have recently, for the first time in a while, watched a Nicolas Roeg movie, and make sure to have a couple of other Roegs burned pretty well into your brain. This way, you have some context for how, in the now British-set movie you're watching, where the characters are simultaneously though at unequal ratios very much at home and very much not at home, the montage keeps vacillating among observing human interactions, observing nonhuman animals and landscapes in ways that evoke obscure energies and impulses, and observing city exteriors and especially domestic interiors in ways that imply they might eat somebody, which they have palpably done before. Note how this movie is both an up-to-the-minute, realistic, family-in-crisis North American indie and a UK art film, drawing on 50-year-old strategies that haven't lost their charge. Note how this uncertain blending of national styles is directly in line with the transatlantic characters’ experience of who and where they are (and aren't). Remain afraid, not of any one thing. Just afraid. Experience the convergence of aesthetic legacies and national cultures as something like the collision of two weather fronts, producing in each case a strange but hypnotizing storm.
8. Be a long-term Carrie Coon skeptic who has seen her multiple times on stage, multiple times in film, and once in a beloved season of TV but has come away cold basically every time. Take deep, epiphanic pleasure in a characterization that encompasses both determined withholding and tempestuous outlashing, but not in ways that bluntly correlate to when the character herself is being quietest or loudest. Watch how she watches everybody in her family and gauges how she, in return, is being differently watched and measured by each of them. Watch the absolute fury she channels into hurling a bale of hay. Get to know the character so well that you start being able to predict her reactions, even when she herself is surprised by them, but not in ways that put you unhelpfully ahead of the movie or that drain the actor's performance of surprise. Make a mental bookmark to gush internally about her work, maybe when you eventually go to bed, but not now, when there's too much else happening.
9. Ponder that massive Elizabethan table, and those amazing hardwood floors. You wouldn't want to live there, but yeesh!
10. Let your heart break for tremulous, 12-year-old Charlie Shotwell, sending beautifully compressed dispatches of despondency from the mostly unseen movie his character is in, particularly during elided hours when he's at school or when he's alone in his new room in a house that scares him, stewing in unhappiness and in guilt or fear of admitting that unhappiness. Note the other cinematic touchpoints, especially British ones, that emerge in the movie via this characterization and the way he occupies space—like chambers or corridors of a house that escaped notice until just now. Savor equally the performance of all-but-newcomer Oona Roche as his older sister, who will wait the longest of all these characters for her big moment but resist the temptation, as do the filmmakers, to overplay it. Praise everyone working on The Nest for presenting two step-siblings, a tween and a teen, who act at every instant how those children would probably act in the same real-life situations, from big emotional releases to mundane breakfast-table mornings. Recognize how seldom we see credible kids in movies, expressed by already accomplished performers and not just tykes or adolescents being themselves.
11. Relish having Jude Law so completely, adroitly back, polychromatically playing a character whose whole Thing is presenting just two or three colors, most of them false. Get excited that this, like last year's similarly underseen The Order, is the kind of work he seems keen to develop for himself (and for others) now that he's started his own company and grown by leaps and bounds into the rule of producer. Note how ironic this is vis-à-vis The Nest, which takes such a ...different view of his character’s hunger to launch his own company.
12. Spend the whole movie misidentifying the Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély as the Béla Tarr/Turin Horse guy, when he's in fact, you later discover, the László Nemes/Son of Saul guy. Chide yourself in a ridiculously #FilmTwitter you-need-to-chill way. Still, be impressed that for all those films’ and filmmakers’ exquisite and often violent attunement to spatial dynamics, nothing about the visuals of The Nest recall those of Son of Saul, or for that matter The Turin Horse. Newly consider watching badly reviewed movies like Foe, solely because Erdély shot them.
13. Whisper out loud, "Anne motherfucking Reid!"
14. Explain the now-tumultuous 1am storm to your wakened but delirious partner, who was sleeping so deeply that he, the fully reconciled child of many a rageful Midwestern storm, doesn't really understand what's going on... whereas you, who loathes thunderstorms more than anything except bigotry and authoritarianism, have readily blocked this one out for long minutes at a time. Feel bad that it might ease your partner’s bewilderment or help him go back to sleep if you also went to bed, but what remains of The Nest is a) so little, and b) climactic. Coon has just gotten up from a restaurant table, dramatically but believably, to go to the bathroom. Love you, D, but you're on your own.
15. Not quite 20 minutes later, get in bed, after the thunder and rain have stopped, in direct and maybe occult sync with the movie’s own wind-down, if you could remotely call it that. While the still-supernatural lightning continues to strobe, think about the end of The Nest, and all of The Nest. Consider texting your friend Tim Robey, who's probably awake by now in London and who urged you years ago to prioritize this movie. Postpone till morning, only because it's good to sleep, and bad form to light up your phone while the person next to you is peaceful and adrift. Doze off at some point despite all your aesthetic, narrative, and thematic excitement about The motherfucking Nest! Worry briefly that you will oversell it to the uninitiated when you inevitably post about it tomorrow.
16. Dream not about The Nest but about a day-long hang abroad with the lovely and companionable Julia Roberts, while your respective partners are off at an event together. Because you are so YOU, and because your subconscious has decided to be especially sweet to you as you finally go under on a broody, electrified night, having nourished that part and every other part of your brain with one humdinger of a film. Grade:A–
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
