About

What I like about the story is that it's a horror film, but without chainsaws and axes flying at you. There is a menace that creeps up on the audience anonymously; you never know from which direction it will appear.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is a blackly comic crime thriller, co-produced by David Lynch – and featuring all the resulting surrealism such a credit would suggest. Michael Shannon plays Brad McCullum, loosely based on the real-life figure of Mark Yarvosky, who was seemingly inspired by his role in a production of the Greek play Orestes when he murdered his own mother in 1979.

The story unfolds in a non-linear fashion, mixing Shannon's character's unravelling with the action of the police siege on his house (led by the inimitable Willem Dafoe). The remainder of the cast is filled with cult favourites – Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier, Bard Dourif, Grace Zabriskie – who gamely lend an air of madness to the proceedings. My Son, My Son is a burst of criminal outlandishness from a grand master of the strange.