The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020) (Patreon)

With its insistence on atmosphere over plot, The Nest is kind of a perfect sophomore film, the sort of work that a young stylist gets to produce after establishing themselves as a rising talent. It's the mark of an artist unwilling to adapt to the standard codices of industry filmmaking, someone intent on going their own way. Despite Sean Durkin's involvement as the showrunner for the very impressive BBC series Southcliffe, the director remains best known for his debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene. That film, while certainly chilly and at times abstract in its organization, was nevertheless grounded by a concept -- the loss of identity that enables cult formation -- that provided a hook, a tangible point of interest that connected MMMM, however tenuously, to the larger world.

By contrast, The Nest is "about" ideas that are so amorphously ideological as to be nearly invisible to most viewers, because we imbibe them like oxygen. Its ostensible emotional core is class anxiety, and in particular the distance between British class consciousness, which assumes a kind of permanence, and an American exceptionalism that holds out false promises of mobility. Even though this problem is stated outright in the script by protagonist Rory (Jude Law), it is a hard notion to peg a film upon, because it assumes enough liminality to even recognize that one or the other way of life isn't just "the way things are." So Rory's crisis, which is one of constantly "faking it til you make it," threatens to look like a slick joke about the excess of the 1980s, a kind of dour flipside to American Psycho.

So Durkin wisely exacerbates this problem with stylistic gravitas. The Nest, as many have already mentioned, resembles a horror film. Rory has rented  an 18th century mansion outside of London for the family to live in, and the slow zooms that continually describe the dark recesses of this space call to mind The Shining or The Uninvited. This is a house haunted by history, by the British tradition of success by birthright. So his wife Allison (Carrie Coon) tries to make the place her own by building a stable for her new horse, but it remains unfinished. Her daughter Samantha (Oona Roche) combats the eerie isolation by throwing a party that almost kills her. And the couple's son Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell) hides in various secret rooms, like some Sarah Winchester figure trying to outpace the ghosts pursuing him.

In terms of its articulation of the gradual decay of a family under the yoke of ideology, The Nest bears a certain superficial resemblance to The Ice Storm, but its closer cousin is actually Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Like that film, The Nest is a slow, stately film about the suffocation that comes with slow, stately living, and all the refined posing that comes with it. If The Nest has a weak spot, it's Durkin's script, which does tend to underline ideas that the film itself would clearly prefer to leave understated. Rory's dinner with investors, when he waxes faux-philosophical about the theater, offers Allison the chance to point out that he, in fact, is the actor. And there is a literal dead horse that becomes a touchstone for Allison's disconnection from her family; we see her in the yard, beating it, before all is said and done.

But what The Nest tells us is that Durkin is a cinematic talent in the classic mold, someone who struggles to overcome the mismatch between language's point-blank referentiality and the expansive, mood-altering potentials of sound and image. This, only his second film, is a point on a curve, and unless funding dries up and Durkin ends up directing episodes of NCIS or Holby City (the fate of so many would-be auteurs), we'll be seeing great things.