At its core, The Nest is a movie about longing. It’s about always wishing for more, in the wake of a childhood that was lacking. The film is also brutal in its look at love, lust and money, and filmmaker Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) likes it that way. With apt comparisons to 1974's A Woman Under the Influence, maybe most of all, Durkin’s The Nest is a look at a relationship in peril. It often feels as though the love between Allison (played by achingly vulnerable Carrie Coon) and Rory (played by a ruthless Jude Law) is a never-ending tug of war with status.
Writer-director Durkin insists the pair never fall out of love. “I think they are fighting to stay together. Marriages are very complicated. They take work, commitment and dialogue. This movie is about two people who were never taught to communicate. They are trying to find faithful communication with one another and they don’t know how to do that, but they are fighting for that whether they know it or not.”
Further complicating matters for the pair is the backdrop of 1980s politics and excess. Durkin chose the year 1986 because he said he could see a really clear thread to today. “That year was a moment of deregulation and privatization and exporting the American dream. I think making something about the past is the best way to talk about today.” Regardless of decade, the film poses the question: What is success? And how do people judge themselves as successful? A universal theme, indeed. Durkin muses, “It’s asking where is ambition good and where do the consequences go too far?”
As one might guess, The Nest examines exactly when things go too far. British Rory moves his American family to England. They are quite literally the export of the American dream themselves, as Rory’s ailing work in the New York stock exchange gives way to a new opportunity in corporate London, that is buoyed by Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of British financial markets. While Rory is praised as a returning rainmaker to the company, his family is conversely feeling lost at sea in the giant manor the patriarch has rented for the family to dwell in. Who he is trying to impress beyond himself is unclear, as the family doesn’t have enough furniture or desire to fill the estate.
When a horse Rory has purchased for Allison, an equestrian, arrives, things worsen. The horse and the house take up a lot of real estate in the second act. The house, a dark character itself, seems to grow bigger and darker the more Rory seeks to find pleasure in his unwavering appetite for capitalism. Durkin says he treated his search for the house like an open casting call, as he needed a location with wide open spaces and long hallways. The house Durkin went with is 750 years old, imposing with its history alone, particularly for a family driven by a patriarch seeking the shiny newness that is often representative of wealth. Durkin said he was seeking a house that felt alive, and this family’s nest is absolutely living and breathing in a very imposing way.
Threads unravel further as Allison discovers Rory is wildly overspending when a contractor stops work on a stable for Allison’s new horse, because Rory’s check has bounced. While Rory is looking for bigger and better, the life he has in front of him shrinks rapidly as mistrust grows in his relationship. While Rory desperately tries to keep up outward appearances, Allison starts working as a stable hand at a nearby farm and gives away a fine fur coat as she flees a dinner party, where she can no longer stand to hear Rory tell lies about the castle of pretense he is building around himself. Allison and Rory both end up on a long journey back to their stately home in the country, equally haunted by lost dreams of pleasure.
Despite their languishing dreams of grandeur, Durkin does bring this pair back together. In a largely silent scene at a kitchen table, a meal is shared. Like the 1980s itself, potential remains. It’s what these two people will do with potential, is also what lingers as the most dangerous question.