& Sons Review – The thrilling showdown between Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton rescues a daunting plot | London Film Festival 2025

nThe film with Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy could have been completely uninteresting – and they lead a great cast here under the direction of the great Argentine director Pablo Trapero, in his English-language debut. He co-wrote the script with another star: Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley.

Yet the resulting picture, adapted from David Gilbert’s 2013 novel, feels ambiguous and daunting. It relies on big twists and revelations that are bafflingly implausible and strangely unconvincing even when taken seriously, and tend to undermine the emotional reality of the entire film and its big showdown scenes – although there is one interesting showdown between Staunton and Nighy, both of whom are black belts at the top of their game.

Nighy is Andrew Dyer, the feisty old literary lion revered around the world for his brilliant young adult novels, who has published nothing for years and is now stranded like a bearded, drunken hermit in his huge Oxfordshire mansion, drinking wine, playing jazz too loud and screaming at the walls. He lives with his Czech housekeeper Gerdy (Anna Geslerova) and his high school student Andy (Noah Jupe), the result of an affair that destroyed his marriage to Isabel (Imelda Staunton).

Andy is (possibly) like Smerdyakov in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: the illegitimate brother of his other older brothers, would-be documentary filmmaker Jimmy (George MacKay) and alcoholic screenwriter Richard (Johnny Flynn). The entire family is inevitably summoned to the palace by Dyer.

Andy and Richard are angry at the old man for the way he treated their mother, but realize the self-loathing they still use in their various careers. The film shows that their intense hatred for Dyer is not helped by the extraordinary claim he now makes about Andy – is this merely a delusional and selfish excuse for his betrayal and the only imaginative effort the tattered old man is now capable of? Or could it be true?

Either way, there’s not much drama to be gained from it. The whole situation revolves around Dyer’s declaration without satisfactorily explaining its claims to truth, or its implications as fiction. Jupe, MacKay, and Flynn convey their roles forcefully enough, though Staunton may have overpowered the male actors as Dyer’s estranged wife; It is Flynn’s character, Richard, who is deeply obsessed with what Dyer owes him, who provides the film’s second revelation, which would suffice in itself for most stories.

There are memories here of other films about aging, and pompous, toxic male auteurs: Björn Runge’s The Wife (2017) and Alice Troughton’s The Lesson (2023). Despite being a film about a dysfunctional family, it’s nowhere near as good as Trapero’s massive crime family thriller The Clan from 2015.

& Sons doesn’t live up to all its filmmaking talent, but Nighy is always entertaining, especially when he orders his nephew Emmett (Arthur Conti) to fix him a whiskey. In his own unthinking way, the boy fills the cup almost to the brim and Dyer smilingly congratulates him on his excellent “scotch-to-air ratio.”