The Son (2022) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A family drama about depression, divorce, guilt, and the dangerous fantasy that love alone can fix what is breaking.
The Son follows Peter, a successful New York lawyer whose carefully managed life is upended when his teenage son Nicholas begins to unravel. Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s screenplay studies depression through the people around it: a son who cannot explain his pain, a mother who feels she has failed, a father desperate to solve what he does not fully understand, and a new partner caught between compassion and fear.
For writers, this screenplay is useful study material for chamber drama, emotional escalation, family conflict, mental-health storytelling, parental blind spots, and the way small domestic choices can become devastating when everyone is trying to avoid the truth.
Ready to get to work? Check out the Study Notes just below. When you're ready, download The Son screenplay.
The Son Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
The Son screenplay is useful to study because it dramatizes emotional crisis through denial, displacement, and the limits of parental confidence. Nicholas cannot clearly describe what is happening inside him, so everyone around him tries to translate his pain into something manageable: school trouble, adolescence, divorce fallout, romantic disappointment, a rough patch, a phase. Peter wants to be the father who finally shows up, but his instinct is to fix, schedule, reassure, forbid, and normalize. The screenplay’s tragedy grows from that gap between loving someone and actually understanding what kind of help they need.
Craft Focus
- Domestic spaces as pressure chambers: Apartments, bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, offices, and therapy rooms become emotional battlegrounds. The drama is intimate, but the stakes keep tightening.
- Depression through behavior: Nicholas’ pain is shown through school avoidance, walking alone, nail-biting, isolation, self-harm, sudden emotional collapse, and difficulty explaining what he feels.
- Parental guilt as plot engine: Peter’s choices are shaped by guilt over leaving Kate and Nicholas. That guilt makes him compassionate, but also dangerously eager to believe he can repair the damage himself.
- Inherited emotional damage: Peter’s strained relationship with his own father echoes through his attempts to parent Nicholas. The screenplay turns fatherhood into a chain of wounds, omissions, and misunderstood responsibility.
Questions for Writers
- How does the opening with Beth, Theo, and Peter establish a fragile new family before Kate arrives with the crisis?
- Where does Peter mistake action for understanding?
- How does Nicholas’ line about life “weighing” him down give the screenplay its emotional diagnosis without over-explaining him?
- How does Beth’s position complicate the story by making compassion share space with exhaustion, fear, and resentment?
While reading, pay attention to how The Son turns reassurance into a danger signal. Peter repeatedly tells others, and himself, that everything will be fine, that Nicholas is improving, that school will help, that rules will help, that love will help. The craft trick is painful: the more Peter insists on normality, the more the screenplay reveals how abnormal the situation has become. This is not a story about parents who do not care. It is about people who care deeply, but keep reaching for the wrong tools in a room where time is running out.
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The Son (2022)
Peter has his busy life with new partner Beth and their baby thrown into disarray when his ex-wife Kate turns up with their teenage son, Nicholas.
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