Dir: Pablo Trapero | Drama 2025
Pablo Trapero’s English language debut is bizarre, beguiling — and never quite convincing
There is something decidedly odd about &Sons, a film that seems determined to be several different things at once. The Argentinian filmmaker mixes up all the ingredients for a smart, emotionally charged family drama — a celebrated patriarch, fractious sons, buried resentments and the prospect of an inheritance — yet somehow keeps slipping sideways into something altogether stranger.
Bill Nighy is a monumental presence and perfectly cast as the ageing father at the centre of this complicated family web. He brings his trademark mixture of elegance, melancholy and dry wit, making even the character’s most exasperating behaviour oddly compelling. Imelda Staunton, meanwhile, is a wonderfully grounded presence, bringing emotional weight and a prickly intelligence to her role. Their performances provide the film with a human centre that the increasingly eccentric plotting sometimes struggles to maintain.
Trapero clearly wants to unsettle the conventions of the conventional family drama. He plays with tone, perspective and shifting loyalties, allowing relationships to become progressively more elusive. There are flashes of real invention, and the film has an undeniable visual and dramatic confidence.
But &Sons is also, frankly off the wall. What begins as an intriguing portrait of family tensions gradually becomes so convoluted and tonally slippery that it is difficult to know quite what Trapero wants us to feel. Characters behave in ways that seem designed more to propel the film towards its next twist than to illuminate them, while the emotional pay-offs don’t always earn the elaborate machinery surrounding them.
Nighy and Staunton do their considerable best to anchor the whole enterprise, and there is enough wit, atmosphere and sheer eccentricity to keep &Sons watchable. But despite Trapero’s evident ambition and considerable directorial skill, the result is a peculiarly elusive film — buzzy, accomplished and intriguing, yet ultimately more bizarre than moving
On DVD, Blu-ray, and all major digital platforms (including iTunes, Amazon, Sky, Google and Virgin) on 5 October from Icon Film Distribution