THE NEST
5/5
Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell
It’s been a full decade since director Sean Durkin creeped the bejesus out of us (and launched Elizabeth Olsen to stardom) with his brilliant, cult-fixated debut Martha Marcy May Marlene. But the long wait for a second film (compounded by a year-long delay to its UK release) proves worth it in this icy, elegant domestic psychodrama, another exercise in eerie imbalance — although this time, the threat is harder to place. Moneyed broker Jude Law moves his wife (Carrie Coon) and children from New York to a dreamy Surrey manor to start a new life, but there are hairline cracks in this idyllic setup that steadily creak and widen. Durkin fashions marital discontent as its own kind of horror movie, played with emotionally cutting precision by Law — in his best performance in eons — and Coon. 27 August