TIFF 09: MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE Review

A remarkably unlikely pairing, one that matches two iconoclastic directors with wildly differing styles, My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done has become one of the most anticipated titles of 2009 purely by virtue of its director-producer pairing of Werner Herzog and David Lynch.  The finished film bears the obvious influence of both men, the fusion working remarkably well in some instances and less well in others for a result I am personally very pleased to have experienced once but will likely feel no urge to experience ever again.

Based on a true story, My Son begins with Willem Dafoe as a homicide detective called to the scene of a brutal crime.  A woman lies dead on the floor of her neighbor's house, run through with a sword.  The crime was carried out by her own son in full view of two witnesses, after which he simply wanders out of the house with his novelty coffee mug in hand, mumbles something incomprehensible to the in-bound police and then barricades himself into his own home claiming to have a pair of hostages.

And so begins the long stand off with the police presence building outside while the story of the young man's live is slowly pieced together thanks largely to the input of his fiancee and a friend / colleague.  And the picture is a strange one - one of massive maternal co-dependency, obsessive behavior and what seems to be a glaringly obvious case of severe mental illness that goes strangely uncommented on by friends and family and thus untreated.

Herzog takes his star-studded cast - Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier, Michael Shannon, Brad Dourif and Grace Zabrisky all star - and stages the film in a highly theatrical style, one that borrows liberally from Lynch's proclivity to long silences and bursts of the surreal.  The dialogue is delivered in an entirely unreal manner, all of it strangely stilted as if the film itself has been corrupted by the mental illness which occupies its core. 

A film that provoked a lot of uncomfortable rustling and more than a few walk outs, My Son, My Son is absolutely not a film to everyone's taste.  It is, for that matter, not even a film that will be to the tastes of a great many Herzog fans.  It owes as much to independent theater as it does to standard narrative film making, the heightened style fusing with the bizarre behavior of Michael Shannon as the killer Brad to create a film that is more interesting and unsettling than it is entertaining.