Father and Son
2016 · 7m
Directed by Mitchell Lazar
Genres: drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
An up-and-coming writer competes against his own father for the same prestigious book award, and the rivalry curdles into resentment, spite, and parental cruelty. Mitchell Lazar's 7-minute drama follows Thomas (Roger Rathburn) and his son Nathan (Chris Gouchoe) toward a painful reveal that only confirms the venom.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent family-drama wound-twist, sure, but it plays the resentment straight—where's the formal perversity, the narrative trap that makes us complicit? Feels like something we've all quietly agreed to feel sad about.
Lazar understands how constraint breeds intensity: seven minutes to decompose a relationship through measured dialogue and the spaces between it, each scene a deliberate turn of the knife that respects both the Aristotelian shape and the cruelty of recognition. The reveal lands because the film never oversells the velocity.
The decision to keep the father's motivations opaque until that final beat—letting Rathburn's face do the moral accounting instead of explaining it—is what transforms a premise about literary jealousy into something about the violence of validation withheld.
Reviews
Father and Son is a pleasure to watch, inasmuch as art is pleasurable despite (and for) its claws. Rathburn and Gouchoe's compellingly ragged chemistry is one of the many strengths of this acute yet understated film.