Based on a harrowing true story centered around policeman Hank (Willem Dafoe), who is called to a bungalow in a respectable San Diego neighborhood where a man named Brad (Michael Shannon) has barricaded himself in his house and taken two hostages. Across the street, Brad’s mother (Grace Zabriskie) lies dead, found sprawled in a pool of blood, the victim of a sword wound. The son is suspected of the murder. As Hank uneasily prowls the sunlit street outside the bungalow, a string of Brad’s friends arrive on the scene, among them his girlfriend and a director pal. Slowly the bizarre pieces of the story are placed in front of the cop, who tries to make sense of it all. Not only has the suspected murderer never been the same since he returned from a kayaking trip to Peru, but he also seems to be suffering from a strange mother complex. To deepen the psychosis even further, Brad has been rehearsing one of Sophocles’ plays that has a lot to do with mothers!
I only saw three movies in a movie theater this year, and if I told you what they were, you might think that I was the biggest film snob this side of the Mason Dixon. But would a film snob endlessly tout his copies of Hamburger: The Movie or Street Trash? I think not. The third and final film I will see in a movie theater this year was My Son My Son, What Have Ye Done, directed and co-written byWerner Herzog, with David Lynch on board as executive producer. And that is just one in a long line of things that are awesome about this film.

Based on a true story, the film depicts the events leading up to a guy killing his mother, who he lives with, then taking some hostages inside his home. The narrative is cut up in a way that for every scene moving the plot forward, there are flashback scenes that give the film its depth and color. As the flick started to play, I realized that everything was under-lit, with actors (includingWillem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, and NYLON cover girl Chloe Sevigny) delivering lines completely in the dark. The technical part of my brain wondered aloud, “What is this, amateur hour? What gives?” But as the movie went on, I realized that it was no accident that the lights were left at the rental house; limiting lighting strictly to what was naturally available in each scene only made the film seem more casual—and, in turn, drew me deeper into the world that this story exists in

This film reminds you that it’s a great thing when European directors come to Hollywood and get to tell stories their way. To watch a film that wasn’t trying to rip off Wes Anderson—as the majority of quirky independent films with quirky independent characters who spout quirky independent dialogue often try to do (including Wes Anderson)—was refreshing.

The supporting actors aren’t playing “quirky,” they are just amazingly weird. Udo Kier (from Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein) sends it on home as an avant-garde theater director, Brad Dourif (best known as Billy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) plays an prickly ostrich ranch owner, and Grace Zabriskie (Laura Palmer’s mom from Twin Peaks) is an overbearing mother with a weird penchant for flamingos and black jello. It goes without saying that main actors Dafoe and Sevigny can do no wrong.

The one problem? Michael Shannon. He looks like Bam Margera and acts the way Eddie Vedder sings: constantly pissed off and emoting through a half open mouth that might have a wad of chew in it. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter. This is one of the greatest flicks I’ve seen in a long time, and definitely a good reason to put your butt in a movie theater seat for an hour and a half.
JAY BUIM

If you didn’t already know that David Lynch had a hand in producing My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, it wouldn’t take long to make the connection. Packed with Lynchian signatures — sudden lapses into the surreal, a curiosity about big birds and little people — and directed byWerner Herzog, the film is a bizarre merger of two uncommonly individual and idiosyncratic styles. Add a lead actor (Michael Shannon ) who has constructed a career from characters on the verge of mental breakdown (most recently in The Missing Person and Revolutionary Road), and you have what amounts to a perfect storm of cinematic weirdness.

Loosely based on the horrifying true story of Mark Yarovsky — a San Diego grad student who, after being cast as the matricidal lead in the Greek tragedy Orestes, went on to murder his own mother with an antique saber — My Son resembles the standard crime movie about as much as the dysfunctional family in Precious resembles the Walton clan. Shannon plays Brad McCullum, who, as the movie opens, has just knifed his widowed mum and is holed up in their flamingo-themed home, allegedly with two hostages. Outside, Detective Hank Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and his partner (Michael Pena) monitor the scene while a local SWAT team awaits instructions.
Willem Dafoe
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My Son, My Son is inspired by the true story of Mark Yavorsky, who killed his mother in 1979. After the fictional Brad stabs his mother and barricades himself in her house, Detective Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe, center) arrives to negotiate.
Willem Dafoe

My Son, My Son is inspired by the true story of Mark Yavorsky, who killed his mother in 1979. After the fictional Brad stabs his mother and barricades himself in her house, Detective Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe, center) arrives to negotiate.

Bit by bit and flashback by flashback, a portrait of the killer emerges from the recollections of those who saunter up to be questioned by Havenhurst. Brad’s colorless fiancee, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), bemoans the change in her beloved after a whitewater rafting trip to Peru; his oily theater director (Udo Kier) recalls firing him when his behavior threatened to halt the play’s production.

But as the flashbacks accumulate, we begin to realize we’re learning next to nothing about Brad’s motivation for the crime: His mother (Grace Zabriskie, the ne plus ultra of pursed-lip disapproval) may be suffocatingly needy, but her worst crime appears to be serving up disgusting Jell-O.

What the flashbacks do illuminate is Brad’s deteriorating mental state and the hilarious refusal of Ingrid et al. to recognize it. As we accompany Brad from Mexico to China, from an ostrich farm run by his Uncle Ted (a manic Brad Dourif) to the naval hospital where his father died (and where he loudly demands to visit “the sick”), the screenplay (byHerzog and Herbert Golder) carefully avoids the words “late-onset schizophrenia.” To his nearest and dearest, Brad is simply a guy who calls himself Farouk and thinks God is conversing with him from a box of Quaker Oats.

With its theatrical line delivery, stagey scene construction and a central performance of unvarying eccentricity, My Son revels in the most alienating impulses of bothLynch and Herzog . (Let us not even discuss the tuxedo-wearing dwarf.) At times, though, the film’s very oddness achieves a Twin Peaks level of artful ingenuity, as with the Greek chorus of crime-scene rubberneckers framed in the rear windows of an ambulance, or the glass tunnel of a Canadian airport filmed to look like a wormhole to infinity.

Photographed with bare-bones simplicity by longtime Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger, My Son presents yet another Herzogian hero who views insanity as the only logical response to an insane world. From Fitzcarraldo to Grizzly Man, the director has championed the fiercely alienated and the uniquely possessed: ToHerzog , our most lovable misanthropist, that lone penguin wandering off to his death in Encounters at the End of the World might just be the only rational member of his flock
Werner Herzog’s latest madman to illuminate the screen obviously doesn’t star his infamous collaborator, the late Klaus Kinski, or even the relatively more sedate Bad Lieutenant Nicolas Cage. Instead, Herzog’s star is Michael Shannon, the Oscar nominee whose performance as a man recently released from a mental institution was the best thing about Revolutionary Road. In Revolutionary Road, Shannon’s character John Givings tells Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), “Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

It’s a familiar trope, using the mentally ill to “see” things that other characters are blind to, but in My Son Shannon’s Brad McCullum grows more and more out of touch with reality until he believes God lives in his house, in a package of oatmeal.

My Son begins near the end. Two detectives (Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña) are on their way to a crime scene in a drowsy neighborhood of San Diego. On their way in, Detective Hank Havenhurst (Dafoe) is stopped by a neighbor holding a coffee cup, who amiably mumbles, “Razzle dazzle them. Razzle dazzle them,” takes a sip from his cup (which reads “Razzle Dazzle”), and walks quietly away.

When they arrive, they find a dead body, the murder weapon nearby, and, strangely enough, the two witnesses still sitting in the chairs they were in when the murder occurred. They learn the suspect was the gangly neighbor with the coffee cup, and indeed, one of the witnesses says, “Brad McCullum. He did it. He stabbed her. Ever since he came back from from Peru, he’s been strange. Well, not so much strange, as… different.”Cut to Peru, where Brad watches his friends smoke weed, meditate, and head to their deaths in high-rising rapids. He intones, “I’m not going to take your vitamin pills. I’m not going to drink your herbal tea. I’m not going to the sweat lodge with an 108-year-old Native American who reads Hustler magazine and smokes Kool cigarettes. I’m not going to discover my boundaries. I am going to stunt my inner growth. I think I shall I become a Muslim. Call me Faruk.”

Back in California, the apparently once-promising basketball player still lives with his mother, who solicitously offers him and his fiancée Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) brownies as they get ready for bed and, in a later scene, tries to feed him at the dinner table. These creepy domestic scenes are obviously at the root of Brad’s mental illness, which seems to escape both Ingrid and Brad’s friend, play director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier). The movie flashes between Brad, who is at his house brandishing a shotgun and threatening that he has two hostages, and stories from Ingrid and Lee as Havenhurst interviews them.

The stories they share veer into Lynch-land, which is only to be expected since Lynch is a collaborator and exec producer, and the movie was produced by Lynch’s company Absurda. This does lend itself to occasional, perhaps unintentional, hilarity, like when Brad takes Lee to his uncle’s ostrich farm and an ostrich almost manages to swallow Lee’s glasses. His uncle, played by Brad Dourif, imagines a fantastical commercial where a midget rides a miniature pony as they’re being chased by one of his famously overgrown roosters named Willard. Cut to a triptych of Uncle Ted, Verne Troyer in a tuxedo standing on a the stump of a giant tree behind and above them, and Brad, which the camera lingers on for far too long. Ingrid has to rescue him from Tijuana where he’s in a hotel “bringing heaven to earth” by dangling a light bulb above a handful of prescription glasses arranged in a circle. He demands to be taken to the Veterans Hospital to see “the sick,” then buys an armful of pillows at the gift shop. Ingrid mentions offhand that she had hoped Brad was going to the hospital for himself to get treated for his depression, but this is the only indication that anyone is aware that Brad is growing increasingly delusional and dangerous.

They both notice that Brad is increasingly agitated about the play he’s performing in, part of The Oresteia trilogy, and specifically the scene where he, as Orestes, kills his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon’s murder. Brad even insists on obtaining a real sword for a prop, which, of course, he later uses as the murder weapon. And Ingrid plays Clytemnestra, adding a nice frisson of Oedipal ick. Eventually, Lee has to throw Brad out of the play because he gets so worked up about it, but still, no one steps in to help Brad as he gets sucked farther and farther into his delusions.

This sort of slow-motion obliviousness with chunks of what-the-hell thrown in colors the entire movie. Occasionally, Ingrid will reveal details that indicate she knows Brad is way off, like how weird it was that Brad would whisper to her during the play to move her feet after he’s murdered her because he wants to see his mother’s feet dance their way to heaven. Otherwise, what seems so forehead-slappingly obvious to the viewer completely eludes our characters.

Visually, the only really interesting parts to look at were those aforementioned nods to Lynch, especially the surreal McCullum home and its pink flamingo-themed décor. (Another nod to Lynch is that Brad’s mom is played by Grace Zabriskie from Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart; she was also in the HBO show Big Love with Sevigny.) The cinematography remains fairly flat with the exception of a scene in an airport in Calgary where Brad sees “the tunnel of time” in the glass enclosures around them and in a scene in Peru that uses a camera with a wide angle lens mounted to Shannon’s chest, giving the viewer the feeling of Brad’s increasing confusing and anxiety, the same technique used in Mean Streets in the bar scene with Harvey Keitel.

Dafoe chews a little scenery but for the most part stays in line with the rest of the cast’s flat affectation. It’s hard to tell if that’s on purpose as an allusion to the play within the movie, or if it’s simply bad acting. Shannon, who is known for hitting it out of the park no matter how small his part, gives an alarming performance, but even as his agitation worsens and his illness escalates, it still feels flat, like playing the same note louder and louder until an unsatisfactory climax is achieved