My Son | Film Review

I heard nothing about this film before it came out on Amazon Prime Video, and ultimately I watched it as soon as I did because I'm a huge fan of James McAvoy. 

When Edmond Murray (James McAvoy) finds out that his 7-year-old son has gone missing, he and his ex-wife Joan (Claire Foy) do everything they can to find him.

The gimmick of this movie is that, everyone involved in the film was given a script apart from James McAvoy. His performance is completely improvised. And as amazing as that is, I didn't actually realise this fact until I had already watched and made my mind up about the film - so I'll definitely be giving it another watch!

While the film was somewhat interesting, I didn't really enjoy it.

James McAvoy and Claire Foy have great chemistry, and make a really good team, both within the film and as an acting duo.

The film is tense and uncomfortable. There are multiple times, particularly in the first half-hour of the film, when you are on the edge of your seat watching to see what happens next.

Again in the first half-hour, there are a lot of directions that the film can go in, and it's interesting to see the way that the story develops.

From here on, the film moves quite slowly, with stints of not much happening at all.

There were many times when it felt like different stories were added, or scenes were drawn out, for no reason, because they didn't enhance the story in any way.

After watching 3/4 of the film, I stopped caring about what the outcome would be. One reason for this is because the story took a direction that didn't interest me. It felt a bit easy, and made a lot of the previous scenes obsolete. 

The lacklustre ending and explanation ruined the film for me. I would have loved the outcome to be literally anything else. The ending actually made the whole film feel a bit pointless.

Overall, despite a somewhat exciting premise, not a lot happens in this film. Having said that, after realising that McAvoy's involvement in the film is completely improvised, I would say that the film is worth a watch.

4.5/10