Critics reviews

If The Son is the first among equals in the Dardennes' remarkable body of work, it is because its dramatic crux most perfectly articulates the epic power ingrained in their determinedly and deceptively small-scale workings. Rigorously adhering to the circumscribed life, milieu, and field of vision afforded Olivier, eschewing any hint of allegorical or symbolic inflation, The Son moves organically into one of the richest evocations of worldly existence and experience achieved in cinema.

If this film lacks the exquisite moral tension of Rosetta, one is nevertheless loathe to make the best the enemy of the good. The weight of the film is borne by the great Gourmet, so essential to both Rosettaand La Promesse, and happily the recipient of the acting prize at Cannes for his work here... As Léaud was to Truffaut, Wayne to Ford, Chishu Ryu to Ozu, so is Gourmet to these masterful and profoundly fraternal film-makers.

[The Dardennes] ask us to discover certain crucial facts for ourselves: by the time we're faced with questions of ethical and spiritual import, we've done enough groundwork to assess the evidence properly. Wisely, the camera stays close to Gourmet, with the result that, notwithstanding his subtle understatement and a relatively taciturn script, we're privy to his every fleeting thought and nagging emotion. Never manipulative or sensationalist, the film is none the less deeply moving.

The Dardennes' extremely physical and visceral camera style plunges the viewer into an emotional maelstrom, and their subtle, unpredictable sense of character is predicated not on coercion of the audience but on an extraordinary respect for the viewer as well as the characters. To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life--but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

Absorbed with the nuts and bolts of the task at hand, The Son is a masterfully rough-hewn piece of work—it has the unmediated feel of a single, sustained scene... Because this brusque, unsmiling carpenter always seems to be thinking, the audience spends much of the movie wondering what's on his mind—at one point, Olivier glimpses his murderous reflection in a rest room mirror and the realization dawns that he may be wondering too...

The Robert Bresson comparison is probably the best way to describe the film: awkward, fragmented body shots (usually the back of the head), unemotive actors, and repeated shots of manual labor. Although I still think that La Promesse is their best film, this is certainly very high caliber filmmaking, along par with Rosetta. The handheld camera was especially pervasive in this film, and I must admit, I was not feeling too well for the rest of the evening.