Avis des critiques

Essentially a haunted-house movie without any ghosts, The Nest has all the storytelling control that distinguished Durkin’s first film. Every tiny emotional shift and new resentment registers, building to more profound conflict. And though the plot is tightly focused on the central couple and powered by career-best work from Law and Coon, Durkin is spinning a larger yarn about a decade of excess (the film is set in the 1980s) and the illusory appeal of upward class mobility.

["The Nest"] offers a favorable vision of modest aspiration... Yet it does so with no depth, no inwardness, no sense of the frustrations and the hungers that drive big needs and desires, whether among the rich or the poor; the movie moralizes rather than probes.

It’s certainly a fine piece of craft, but The Nest’s chilliness never amounts to much in the way of emotional payoff, leaving us yearning for something darker and more dramatic.

What really makes "The Nest" compelling is its visual style. From the first shot, it’s evident that something is about to go down... It’s pure pleasure to watch a film like "The Nest," which is scary for all the right reasons and leaves you feeling unsettled at the end.

Durkin has lost none of his compositional precision. The family home is ill-lit, ill-omened, and panelled in dark wood, with shadows deep enough to harbor the eavesdropper or to shield the fearful... The problem, for “The Nest,” is that the sourness is present from the start; [Jude Law] never gives off the bounce and the thrust that Rory is rumored to possess.

Writer/director Sean Durkin ("Martha Marcy May Marlene") has delivered the cinematic equivalent of those substantial, long-yet-not-too-long short stories that says everything about its subject without actually saying everything; or, perhaps conversely, a poem or song that takes you through stages/aspects of a magnetic but destructive relationship.

A carefully drawn portrait of how metaphorical emptiness breeds alienation and self-destruction. Conjuring the spirit of literary giants such as Fitzgerald or Henry James... it’s a blazing reminder of the director/screenwriter’s persuasive talents.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, "The Nest" doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.

In terms of form and content, you could easily describe the writer-director’s dispatch from yesteryear’s class struggle as "The Shining" meets "Scenes From a Marriage." Some clever folks have even referred to "The Nest" as a haunted house movie, which is somewhat correct — it’s just not the house that’s doing the haunting.

[Durkin] hasn't missed a beat as a filmmaker when it comes to building a sense of dread and implication. The Nest pushes up against the edges of the supernatural, of the way that shadows in big, empty houses play tricks on you, but it's all in service of a simple drama of a couple falling apart as the rocky foundations of their world are exposed.

The Nest is only [Durkin's] second film... and you could easily spend the next decade trying to decode its themes. But it's enough, almost, just to watch him linger on the formidable Coon rage-smoking a cigarette, a force as seductive and inscrutable as the story she's in.

If Durkin’s writing doesn’t always match his formal flair, “The Nest” has a bracing economy, cramming a lot into tight quarters.