Movie Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

After his recent "Bad Lieutenant" re-imagining, Werner Herzog returns to cinema with a tale full of the mad, primal impulses and enigmatic directorial flourishes that since the '70s have made him difficult for daring cinephiles to ignore.

Inspired by a true story, "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" circles around the mind of a murderer (Brad McCullum, played by Michael Shannon with the same inward-directed intensity he brought to "Revolutionary Road") via police interviews conducted with the killer's fiancee (Chloe« Sevigny) and the director of a play he was involved in (Udo Kier). The interviews are held across the street from the tacky pink house, decorated with flamingos and surrounded by many species of cacti, in which McCullum has barricaded himself with hostages.

Willem Dafoe is uncharacteristically straightforward as the detective trying to understand why McCullum would slay someone in a neighbor's living room, then calmly wait among onlookers before walking home to invite a standoff. Slowly, through flashbacks triggered by these interviews, we witness the mental collapse Brad suffered a year ago in Peru (that most Herzogovian land of mystery) and see how dramatically strange he has been for the past year.

Strangeness is something Herzog has never had trouble delivering, but here his sensibility is augmented by executive producer David Lynch, whose brittle-faced frequent collaborator Grace Zabriskie plays the killer's inappropriately intimate mother. Lynch's attention to oppressive background sounds has rubbed off on Herzog here, and you can bet that, if any of the film's financiers balked at the instances where Herzog had his actors freeze mid-scene to form cryptic tableaux vivants, Lynch was there to back him up.

Did Lynch's recent experiments with digital cameras inspire Herzog's decision to shoot this on video instead of film? He uses the medium expressively, from the picture's first shot — a blue sky set against an unnaturally gray-brown embankment of dead grass — to the depth of its shadows, which sometimes swallow background elements entirely.

The bizarre reptile fixation of "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is echoed here with images of flamingos and ostriches, but in this less comic movie the non sequiturs play more directly to the peculiar derangement afflicting Brad McCullum.

In the end, Herzog refuses to suggest an explanation for the man's breakdown, but he paints a picture of it in a way that perhaps only he can.