& Sons (2025)

Bill Nighy plays reclusive novelists in his sleep by now, so the pleasure of watching him do it again in & Sons comes from the details rather than the surprise. Here he is A.N. Dyer, summoning two estranged sons to his country house because he has convinced himself he is dying, and for the first forty minutes the film has the confidence of something that knows exactly what it wants to be.

Richard (Johnny Flynn), the alcoholic screenwriter failing to make it in America, and Jamie (George MacKay), the artist who turned the family’s dysfunction into raw material for his own work, arrive carrying decades of resentment and not much appetite for reconciliation. Their father has other plans. Rather than apologise, he tells them something that could rewrite everything they think they know about their childhood, and the film pivots from family drama into something considerably stranger. That’s as far as I’ll go on plot, because knowing less serves this one better.

Trapero, directing from a screenplay he wrote with Sarah Polley, shoots the opening scenes with real fluidity: wide, patient framing that lets Nighy’s stillness do the work, and a sound design, courtesy of Xavier Mas and Daniel Miranda, that makes a glass-walled party scene feel genuinely alive rather than merely decorated. I noticed it. Good sound design in a crowded ensemble drama is rare enough that when it works, it deserves naming.

Where the film loses me is exactly where it needs its nerve most. Once the father’s secret is out, the middle stretch asks the audience to hold two competing readings of what’s happening without ever fully committing to either. Ambiguity can be a strength. Take his story as fact, or as an old man’s last great piece of fiction: either reading changes what every scene around it means, and a film built on a fabulist’s unreliable account of his own life could have made that instability its entire point. & Sons flirts with the idea and then retreats into a fairly conventional inheritance plot, as though it lost its nerve about the harder version of the story it was already telling.

Imelda Staunton and Dominic West do what they can with roles that thin out as the film goes on; Staunton in particular gets one scene of real weight and then almost nothing else to do with it. Noah Jupe, as Andy, the son summoned specifically because of what he represents rather than who he is, carries more of the emotional load than his screen time would suggest, and he’s good enough that I wanted the film to trust him with more.

Is this worth two hours? For Nighy’s performance and the craft of the opening act, yes, with the caveat that the back half never earns what that opening promised. It’s the kind of result where the strengths and the weaknesses genuinely cancel each other out rather than one outweighing the other; not a film I’d steer anyone away from, not one I’d insist on either. Go in expecting a tidy family drama that resolves its own strangeness and you’ll leave disappointed. Go in curious about how a film handles a father who might be lying about everything, including his own death, and there’s enough here to justify the ticket.