‘Your Son’ [‘Tu Hijo’]: A Father's Love Leads To Violence In This Gritty Psychological Thriller [Review]

Jaime Jiménez (Jose Coronado) lives an everyman nightmare: A middle-aged surgeon in Sevilla, he drives numbly through rainy streets, with the backdrop of radio presenters murmuring about unemployment and economic dissatisfaction. Jaime is constantly shut out of his daughter Sara’s life (Asia Ortega). Meanwhile, his wife, Carmen (Ana Wagener) is barely a presence in his life. The only tether to the real world is Jaime’s beloved son, Marcos (Pol Monen), a high school-aged runner and his father’s jogging partner, who is, in every way, the golden boy. So when Jaime discovers his son, lying comatose and beaten within an inch of his life, he privately vows to track down the assailants and learn what really transpired that night. What follows in the film “Your Son” is a grisly mission that wreaks havoc on his psychology and leads to the destruction of his family’s well-being.

Yet the “Taken”-esque poetic justice at the core of “Your Son” (“Tu Hijo”) is not quite a simple morality fable, as director Miguel Ángel Vivas teases out the circumstances of Marcos’ assault. Why, for example, do Marcos’ friend Pedro (Marco H. Medina) and his girlfriend Andrea (Ester Expósito) supply conflicting narratives of the evening? Why does the gritty surveillance footage, through which Vivas revisits harrowing scenes of the night, omit the attack itself? As Jaime combs through every resource and tracks down witnesses, his mission quickly veers from detective story to revenge plot. Soon, his son’s blood is not the only one spilled, as the case dirties Jaime’s hands, too.

Vivas displays a knack for noir-like tension, ramping up suspense like a constant revving engine. The filmmaker’s long takes follow Jaime down hallways and through darkened streets, caught in the torrent of his own grief, as his vigilante justice mission takes him into the seedy underbelly. One long take of Jaime, parked in front of a nightclub while a cluster of drunken men antagonizes him through the car window, also stands out. All the while, the film’s evocative soundtrack (composed by Fernando Vacas), a mélange of piano and mournful brass, rings somberly. Pedro J. Márquez’s cinematography darts rapidly from one extreme to another, from sound to silence, dark to light — from the sordid back alleyways of the nightclub where Marcos was attacked, to the hospital’s sterile white hallways where he paces, shocked and tormented by frustration.

It’s in these moments of anticipated violence and unexpected calm that the thriller’s anxiety resonates most piquantly, as Vivas tracks Jaime’s gradual breakdown from a disciplined surgeon to anguished father. The film’s most effective violence is not corporeal or bloody, but rather psychological. If “Your Son” has any moral import, it’s that fathers will go to extreme lengths to protect their sons — a theme that Vivas examines and reexamines again and again in this film. Even when it seems as though Jaime’s hope ought to be lost and that his mission is surely futile, the father perseveres with a frightening, steely-eyed determination. In Jaime’s own words, “A father can’t do nothing.”

And it’s not just Jaime. Paternal love incites protective violence in a number of characters. “Nobody touches my boy!” shouts one father in the film. “Nobody! He’s sacred.” Another character, after a particularly gruesome incident involving a hammer, threatens Jaime, “I can forgive almost anything. But you went after my son. Stay away from him.” In the age of so-called “snowplow parenting,” Vivas turns his attention to questions of parenting as it intersects with privilege and toxic masculinity. When does a father’s love cross a boundary? When does revenge go too far?

The father-as-savior plot evokes a few recent American counterparts, like the aforementioned “Taken” and last year’s thriller starring John ChoSearching.” Like the latter, “Your Son” is certainly a 21st-century invention, for the way it seamlessly integrates modern technology. Social media and the smartphone have become an obvious medium for modern thrillers, and “Your Son” is no exception. Criminal evidence is much more intangible, ephemeral, easily and irretrievably lost. When a smartphone locks, a crucial piece of evidence vanishes from the case. The film’s final plot twist, too, hinges on a similar detail.

Though it seems attentive to modernity, “Your Son” has a tendency to sideline its female characters, as they fade into taciturn fixtures of the film’s background. Jaime all but forgets his wife and only troubles with his daughter Sara when she misbehaves or aides his case. Even Andrea, who becomes a much more consequential character in the climax, seems preemptively quashed. It makes marginal sense for a film so obsessed with masculinity and fatherhood. Yet as it turns female trauma into spectacle, the lack of female subjectivity feels like a troubling omission. A father can’t do nothing. Apparently, a mother can. [B+]