電影《金窩駭浪》影評：[Film Review] The Nest (2020) 7.4/10

Structuring, at first glance, like a horror fare, partially courtesy to its slightly unsettling, lamenting score, THE NEST narrates the story of a typical middle-class American nuclear family, the O’Haras, embowered in suburban contentment during the Reagan era. Then one day, Rory O’Hara (Law), a tradesman hailed from the Great Britain, proposes to his wife Allison (Coon) that they might transplant to London, as he receives a munificent offer from his previous employee Arthur Davis (Culkin) to work there.

Allison takes the cushy offer with a pinch of salt, as the family has already been relocated several times, but Rory doesn’t really ask for her permission, but compliance. Once there, he immediately lavishes the family with luxury, renting a capacious mansion in Surrey, building a paddock and buying a new horse for Allison (because she is a cowgirl born and raised), enrolling their two children, Samantha (Roche) and Benjamin (Shotwell), in expensive private schools. But soon a crack appears on their ostensible easy street, but it is not as we are lead to expect, no, it is not a haunting mansion scare-fest, but the shattering distress it reveals is no less emphatic.

The second feature from the maker of MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011), Durkin’s long-in-gestation marital drama hinges on two sterling performances by Law and Coon. For Law, his Rory is an overachiever whose self-efficacy is monomaniacally built upon chasing an opulent life to compensate a foul childhood (Anne Reid stuns in the cameo as Rory’s distant, bitter and accusatory mother). After his American dream fails to materialize (or he is not patient enough to sow the seeds), Rory is eager to get onboard any possibility to fast-track this ultimate goal, which blinds his insight and judgment, therefore, he must be taken down a peg or two in the cutting-throat corporal world, and his downfall is inevitable, and spectacularly, Law shows off Rory’s ingrained fanfaronade, but also underpins his miffed humiliation when fate shuts its door right in front of his face.

However, the pillar of strength actually falls on Coon’s Allison, whose ill-adaptation of the transatlantic transport takes a traumatic turn when her equine friend abruptly perishes, which coincides with (or more accurately, aggravates) her already unraveling marriage (she can no longer stomach Rory’s braggadocio anymore), and what adds insult to injury is the mounting strain between her and a rebellious Samantha (Durkin’s understated revelation that Sam is from Allison’s previous marriage takes its own sweet time to apprise viewers). Coon delivers Allison’s multifarious emotional planes of frustration, displacement and resentment to a fare-thee-well, yet, she is also an accomplice in the family’s plight, Allison must be well aware of what a man she marries since their marriage has last over a decade. And Coon perspicaciously telegraphs that, on some level, Allison’s simmering angst is also inward towards herself, it always takes two to tango, therefore, the downbeat ending, after everyone experiences a disillusioned/disturbed night (including Samantha and Benjamin), ascertains that no easy solution is at hand, you can blame it on the cavernous, creep 「nest」, but the curse will follow this ill-matched couple and their offspring whenever they go. In short, THE NEST is a a dirge for a yuppie’s dream goes south, and Durkin should get some plaudits for eliciting two high-octane performances and concretizing a quaintly subdue, gorgeously enticing ‘80s milieu, to say the very least.

referential entries: Durkin’s MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011, 6.4/10); Noah Baumbach’s MARRIAGE STORY (2019, 7.8/10); Sam Mendes’ REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (2008, 8.2/10).