Writer-director Sean Durkin’s first feature film, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, was a marvelous, gripping story with a star turn from a then-unknown Elizabeth Olsen – or, if she was known, it was for being a younger sister – that seemed to herald great things for Durkin once he had more resources available for another project. He finally returned to the screen in 2020 with The Nest, another extremely taut, well-acted, psychological thriller, returning again to themes of emotional manipulation and broken people, this time in a nuclear family where the couple are frantically trying to ignore the cracks in their marriage’s foundation.
Set in the 1980s, which is evident from the music to the clothes to the hairstyles, The Nest follows Roy (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they relocate from New York City to the English countryside, where Roy believes he’ll find new business opportunities with a previous employer. They move into a giant Victorian house in Surrey that’s far too big for them and their two children, but it becomes evident that it is another symptom of Roy’s penchant for magical thinking and aspiration. The move isn’t for new opportunities, but because he’s broke, as Allison learns when construction on the stables for her horse-training business comes to an abrupt halt, and the lucrative deal he thinks he’s going to strike with his old firm turns out to be another pipe dream. The illusory world Roy has built around himself begins to crumble, while Allison tires of pretending everything is fine and becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, while her teenaged daughter, adrift and also recognizing an opportunity as teenagers do, rebels against them and the changes they’ve forced upon her.
The Nest is a movie of privilege, not about its exercise, but about its mere existence. Roy and Allison worry about things like status and appearances because they can – somehow, even with his chicanery and extravagance, they still have enough money to support themselves, and send the kids to private school, and, in Allison’s case, to keep a cash box hidden in the house because she knows full well that Roy is unreliable when it comes to money. The wounds here are self-inflicted, and we do get some brief glimpses of why as we learn a little of Roy’s and Allison’s histories, so this film is concerned with the suffering we create for ourselves rather than that the world imposes on us – more so if we are poor, or nonwhite, or just outside the circles in which these two people travel.
Coon is a treasure, as always – she was the best part of the one season of The Leftovers I watched – and she gives Allison all of the texture that this three-dimensional character requires. She becomes openly derisive of Roy, but also reckless in her own way, and runs the gauntlet of emotions and moods over the course of the film, notably in her growing unease in this house that they can’t afford and that could hold them and all their possessions many times over. She also takes a small step that emphasizes her independence, or at least her refusal to be dependent on such an unreliable man, that also has the side benefit of embarrassing her husband when it comes to light. My cousin Jude is also quite good as Roy, and certainly convincing as that sort of suave confidence man who is just plausible enough that you can see what Allison may have seen in him, but Coon is the absolute star of this movie, and it’s a shame she’s received so little attention on the awards circuit for it, with just a few nominations from local film critics’ circles.
The Nest, like Durkin’s first film, is a slow burn, and the tension lies mostly beneath the movie’s surface, although there’s more of an overt climax in this story than there was in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and also a less ambiguous conclusion. It’s a more polished work, with stronger characterization and a better story arc, although the first film’s ending played better into the idea of a sort of existential terror that this film evokes but doesn’t entirely drive home. They’re both quiet, simple films, however, in a way that might make them hard to sell to a larger audience, but that draw you in because they have the immodesty of reality, and all the pain and suffering it can bring.