“In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.” That little pearl of ladder-climber wisdom comes to us from American Beauty’s oily real estate king Buddy Kane, but it might as well be a mantra to Rory O’Hara, the high-finance failure at the center of Sean Durkin’s exquisite, agonizing film The Nest. Played by Jude Law with a rakish grin almost magnetic enough to obscure the bullshit behind it, Rory puts the professional cart before his purchase of a literal horse, convinced that emulating the trappings of wealth will bring him actual material gain instead of the other way around. If he can just prove to the right money-men that he’s got his whole life together, then he actually will; it’s a proposition that quickly falls apart when put into practice, a humbling process illustrated by Durkin with special attention paid to the fallout suffered by Rory’s family, the most important piece of his illusion.
The film begins with the O’Haras in the States, where British expat Rory has long since relocated to get in on the gold rush of Reaganomics. Even with rampant deregulation, however, he hasn’t been able to insinuate himself into the big-banker fraternity of good ol’ boys. So he hatches an equally half-baked plot to move his wife Allison (Carrie Coon) and their kids back to England, where he can bring his newly accrued American expertise to the employer he left in the first place. Their dire financial straits go from bad to worse as Rory blows every penny on a palatial Surrey mansion and elite prep schooling, all set dressing for his big pitch to the executives. He tries to sell them on a merger with a major American firm, only to be betrayed by his own sweaty desperation. Though Thatcher’s policies in the latter half of the 1980s would precipitate an economic big bang making this proposition a winning move, it’s no matter. Rory can’t sell it, just as he can’t sell himself.
As her husband continues to spiral downward, hemorrhaging their savings as he goes, Allison loses her patience for his selfishness and short-sightedness. Abiding, then angry, then so angry she can’t even bring herself to be mad any more, Coon gives one of the year’s great performances at the point where passive aggression flares into a more active form. She’s the consequence waiting at the end of Rory’s self-immolation, the only one able to hold him to the sum total of his mistakes. When they finally put up their emotional dukes, it’s a face-off between two heavyweight thespians punching for a knockout. Rory’s neutered outcry that “I deserve this!” is as bruising as any haymaker.
Life itself seems to be closing in on the O’Hara clan, a suffocating effect that Durkin replicates with an unsettling ambience around their tomblike new home. Critics were quick to identify this as a haunted house story sans the supernatural element, in which a creeping decay can be owed entirely to a mortal, manmade rot of the soul. The less-than-prolific yet consistently excellent Durkin coaxes out the natural horror inherent to any domestic set-up as dysfunctional as this one, in which a person can come to feel trapped in their own existence. The film tracks the lengths Rory and Allison are willing to go to in order to break out of that feeling, whether that means squandering all they have, or relinquishing what they have left to start anew. Success, Rory finds, is just a lie we all need to eventually stop telling ourselves.
