by Hudson Moura
Adapted from Laurent Petitmangin’s Ce qu’il faut de nuit, Delphine et Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son reframes a familiar social panic—youth radicalization—as an intimate tragedy of care and complicity. The premise is disarmingly simple: a widowed father (Vincent Lindon), who has raised two sons with tenderness and routine, discovers that his beloved elder, Félix—“Fus” (Benjamin Voisin), 23—has slipped into a white-supremacist milieu on after-hours brawls in a derelict factory and the disruption of union marches. In counterpoint, the younger son, Louis (Stefan Crepon), has just been admitted to the Sorbonne. The family’s kitchen-table scenes and small parties radiate warmth. From this closeness, the rupture cuts deeper.
The Coulin sisters stage the film as a sequence of tightening moral frames. Their camera avoids the spectacle of violence; blows land offscreen, bodies are rarely exhibited as trophies. What we watch instead are faces—flushed, guarded, ashamed—held at intimate distance. The choice is ethical and aesthetic: refusing to feed the pornographic economy of extremist display, the film attends to consequence, not carnage. In one emblematic exchange—“You can’t do anything against me,” the son hurls; “But I’m not against you,” the father pleads; “If you’re not with me, you’re against me,” the son retorts—the Coulin sisters crystallize the binary logic that radicalism installs inside a household. Lindon plays the scene with a quiet, almost procedural desperation: seeing and not seeing, opening and closing his eyes in the same breath so as not to lose the boy he still feels obliged to protect.
Spaces carry argument. The abandoned factory where misfits gather to “promote fighting and spew incendiary tirades” is less a lair than a symptom: a vacancy where work, belonging, and recognition should be. Félix’s days—drift by daylight, riots by night—so that the question “What does he seek?” hangs with genuine weight. Is the rage his own, or has a system dropped him? At what point? A late paternal monologue—“When you start saying ‘us’ and ‘them’… it can only end badly… all that is left is violence.”—refuses abstraction: the father assumes the blow himself, as if his failure to interrupt the drift made him responsible for its endgame.
Performance calibrations matter in a chamber piece like this, and the film mostly holds its pitch. Lindon delivers a studied restraint, the kind of inward register that lets gestures—hesitating at a door, lingering on a phone—do the talking. Voisin’s Fus, by contrast, is intermittently less modulated: the volatility reads, but the gradations between grievance, belonging, and creed are sometimes sketched rather than excavated, especially across the mid-section where the descent accelerates. Yet even here the Coulin sisters’ formal discipline—tight shot scales; sound that favors breath, whisper, and the hum of screens over rallying noise—keeps the film from becoming a thesis.
What The Quiet Son understands, and renders without sensationalism, is the double movement that radicalization demands inside a family: the parent’s projection (“if I imagine myself in his place, perhaps I can still save him”) and the child’s inversion of loyalty (“if you are not with us, you are against me”).
If there is a limit, it lies in Voisin’s performance sometimes lacks subtle modulation, and a few beats underline what the staging already implies. By withholding gore and foregrounding aftermath, the Coulin sisters widen the film’s scope from the pathology of a single boy to the conditions that make his grievance legible—precarity, masculine drift, the narcotic certainties of “us” versus “them.” This is a work of close-ups and consequences, not exposés and set-pieces. The Coulin sisters don’t claim that love can redeem ideology. It is not a procedural about infiltration either. Maybe it is a study of how a father absorbs a son’s rage he did not author and cannot master, and how a society that lets boys fall into vacuums of work, meaning, and belonging cannot expect families to fix the damage alone. 
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 