Domestic Disturbance

The Nest is Sean Durkin’s first film since Martha Marcy May Marlene and it’s well worth the decade-long wait. The director and stars Jude Law and Carrie Coon tell Total Film about a family’s fracturing in the shadow of the Overlook Hotel…

- JAMIE GRAHAM

The Shining is the single most important viewing of my life,” says Sean Durkin, the director of cult thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene and the equally disturbing Channel 4 miniseries about a town shooting, Southcliffe. We’re discussing Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece because Durkin’s long-awaited sophomore movie, The Nest – a riveting drama about a family moving from New York to a rambling mansion in Surrey, England – is haunted by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.

“I was 12,” continues Durkin. “I’d just moved to New York, and I went to a friend’s house. His older brother had a VHS of The Shining. We watched it, and it was the first time I knew I wanted to make films – just subconsciously understanding direction and atmosphere. I felt like I had lived in some pretty tense atmospheres, and I think it was my first time seeing a film that expressed tense atmosphere, and an uncanny…” He smiles sheepishly. “I felt quite connected to the whole thing.”

Durkin was born in Canada, spent his childhood in Surrey, and moved to New York when he was 11. When he returned to the UK to shoot Southcliffe in Kent, he was surprised by just how much it felt like home – and he wanted to make a movie to explore that feeling. It took five years to write and develop, but The Nest is worth the wait, emerging as a subtle, slow-burn, painstakingly detailed examination of a marriage and a family coming apart at the seams.