Guillaume Canet in My Son (Cohen Media Group)

Two parents confront the news that their seven-year-old son is lost in a wintry forest. Julien (Guillaume Canet) has been a half-absent father for Mathys (Lino Papa), while his ex-wife took care of the boy after the divorce. Marie (Mélanie Laurent) sent Mathys to camp because she needed some peace for herself and her new husband because of the new baby on the way. The son has disappeared without a trace, while all his things remain in the camp. The watchman confirms that the boy was seen at the last checkup a couple of hours before sunrise. Authorities suspect he has been kidnapped, while each parent feels guilty and anxious to blame the other.

My Son is mainly about the father. Though Julien is not a perfect father, his son is a very important part of his life. He doesn’t stop thinking about happy the memories from the past, and the movie inserts these flashbacks as home videos to punctuate how promising family life was before the divorce. Canet is a formidable actor who reflects in his face the resignation of someone aware that this past is irrecoverable. Directed by Christian Carion, this movie makes a considerable contrast to Carion’s previous war epics (Joyeux Noel and Come What May).

At least for the first half-hour or so, My Son works as an intimate familiar drama underlined by a mystery. The father is interrogated as though he’s one of the suspects, and the police advise him not to leave the city during the investigation. Julien asks if he can do something to involve himself directly in the search, but his initiative is reasonably dismissed.

Julien’s conversation with Grégoire (Olivier de Benoist), Marie’s new husband, takes a violent turn when the latter prefers to speak about home repairs, indicating he doesn’t care about Mathys at all. That’s enough for Julien to attack Grégoire and question him about Mathys’s fate. After this point, the movie changes completely in a sudden and forced way. Julien connects the dots to conclude who abducted his son, and the result is confusing. It has a chaotic resolution that denies any character development and transforms the movie into a thriller without thrills.

Important characters never show up again, and the slow burning drama about a regretful father becomes the kind of action movie that usually stars Liam Neeson or Keanu Reeves, but with a more “realistic” approach (something you can translate as slower and with a lower budget). If the point of this movie is to watch it again to understand it better, it’s already hard to finish it the first time around. The real mystery behind the film is to understand why the potential of a character-driven piece is sacrificed in order to imitate a second-hand commercial flick.