My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done Movie Review (2009)
Inspired by a true story, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, about a man who murders a woman with a sword, has an excellent cast, but is a bit disjointed and dull.
When I come across a movie that is both based on a true story and involves a murder, you can be sure that I am adding it to my watchlist. While I will not delve into scary movies, true crime and serial killers have always been a fascination of mine. And if a film is going to give me the depth of a story where I can then fall down a rabbit hole and research later, even better. I am always here for it, that is a huge win. But sometimes, it’s a miss.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is inspired by a true story of a mentally ill man who murdered his mother with a sword after becoming obsessed with the play that he was in. The film begins just after the events, where detectives are dispatched to the scene of the crime, and want to interview the two witnesses, but they are recuperating. In the meantime, perpetrator Brad McCullam quickly holes up in a house with two hostages and will not come out. His fiancé and friend both arrive at the scene and tell the detectives snapshots of history that begin to form a story of how they arrived at this point.
From the beginning, this drama was much different than I expected, but I am able to go with the flow. The biggest issue is that the flow never really happened. It is difficult to get a firm grasp on this movie, and a lot of that is due to how the story is presented.
Director Werner Herzog approached this film with a vision to keep the viewer detached from the man at the center, and would instead focus on his mental state. This is based on research that I did after watching the film because I wanted to understand what I was missing. This description is exactly what I experienced, and while, in the film, you are watching McCullam in flashback along with his fiancé or his mother, there is no significant interest in what is happening. By the middle of the movie, I wondered if we were ever going to get to the point.
There are some notable choices at play here, including you, the audience, watching the actors stop moving at times. The characters will have been talking, and suddenly McCullam is experiencing something, which, visually, becomes a sort of tableau of the frozen actors. The frame has not frozen, as you can watch them blink or try to hold their bodies still, but it comes across as odd rather than effective.
My favorite part of this film was seeing that, when they were in Tijuana and Central Asia, the people captured on the street were regular people living their lives. There is also a mariachi band who was likely hired moments before filming (or just happened to be at the restaurant where they filmed), and a scene where Chloë Sevigny is politely saying no to people making offers through the car window. These are the most natural and interesting moments of the film until the last 7 minutes, when everything begins to wrap up.
With a great cast of Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, and Udo Kier, I had high hopes for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, but I think it got lost in a vision that didn’t come to fruition the way Herzog was looking for. Or maybe it did, but it doesn’t translate in any kind of engaging way. Take a pass on this one.
Runtime: 90 minutes
Motion Picture Rating: R
Languages Spoken In The Film: English
Should You Watch It? No, I would pass
Did I Cry? Nope
My Rating: 2.25/5 Stars
Available: Free on Tubi, to rent on Prime Video, or may be available for free on other streaming platforms
