‘MY Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done” is as nutty as you’d expect when two of our most eccentric auteurs join forces.
Werner Herzog directed and David Lynch co-produced this antidote to the Oscar-bait blockbusters clogging theaters.
The setting is a bland San Diego suburb, where a young man named Brad (Michael Shannon) has just run his doting mom (Lynch fave Grace Zabriskie) through with a sword in a neighbor’s house.
Cops arrive to discover that Brad has taken refuge in his mom’s electric-pink house — with a shotgun and two hostages.
While heavily armed cops take up positions, a police detective (Willem Dafoe) questions Brad’s fiancée (an underused Chloe Sevigny) and acting coach (Udo Kier) as to the killer’s motivation.
Always a bit odd, we learn, Brad went atomic after returning from a whitewater-rafting expedition in Peru, where he started hearing voices.
The film, said to be based on a real-life incident, throws in Lynchian conceits (a dwarf and pink flamingos among them) with Herzog’s often overwhelming fascination with madmen in South America (Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, as examples).
The result is a surreal descent into a twilight zone created by the twisted sensibilities of two cinematic geniuses.
“My Son, My Son” is one of two films with Dafoe playing at the IFC Center, the other being Lars Von Trier’s amazing “Antichrist.” Sounds like the perfect Christmastime double feature.