Son is a 2021 Irish-American horror thriller film written and directed by Ivan Kavanagh and starring Emile Hirsch, Andi Matichak, and Luke David Blumm.

Premise
Having escaped from a cult as a child, a mother must face her past when its sinister members break into her home and attempt to steal her eight-year old son, David. Now the two are on the run pursued by a detective determined to save them both. Since his aborted kidnapping, something has changed in David and the boy has succumbed to a mysterious illness. Following her maternal instincts to save him, his mother commits unspeakable acts to keep him alive but is losing the battle. Soon, she has to decide how far she is willing to go to save her son.

Summary 
  
Laura flees a cult and stops in a Diner to eat some food. When she sees two men enter the Diner as well, she flees and gets back into the car, speeding away. She begins to go into Labor and pulls over to the side of the road, where she gives birth to a young boy.

Eight years later, Laura is living a normal life with her son, David. Working as a teacher while also attending night classes. One night, Laura hears noises down the hall and, when checking on David, sees a group of strangers standing around his bed before the door suddenly slams shut and locks. Laura goes to her neighbor, Susan, and asks her to call the police. Upon returning to David's room, the people are gone, and David is lying on the bed, looking sick.

Two police officers, Paul and Steve, visit her and while Paul is sympathetic to her, Steve is dismissive of her, believing her to be delusional. Paul gives Laura his card and tells her to call him if anything else happens. That night, Laura has a nightmare of David covered in blood and screaming, and when she wakes up, David is complaining of a headache and an upset stomach. She promises to take him to the hospital if he doesn't feel better in the morning, and then goes downstairs to investigate some strange noises. Upon seeing someone outside the backdoor of her house, she calls Paul, who looks round but doesn't find anyone. David then goes downstairs and vomits up blood.

At the hospital, the doctors are unable to find the cause of David's sickness and warn Laura that he might not recover, advising her to say her goodbyes to David. Laura falls asleep at David's bedside and has a flashback dream to her time with the cult she escaped from, including a banner with the words "He Is Coming" painted on it. When she wakes up, she notices that the door to David's hospital room is open. David starts coughing up blood, but wakes up, and makes a miraclous recovery. The go to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate, but David refuses to eat any of the food.

At the house, Laura informs Paul of her plans to sell the house and flee, but Paul encourages Laura to stay, and to not "let them chase [her] out of [her] house." The two of them begin to kiss, and Laura notices a wound on Paul's arm, which he said was an injury he got dealing with a junkie. They are interrupted when David begins to scream, and they find him convulsing in his bed, and rush him back to the hospital. After David is re-admitted to the hospital, Laura overhears the doctors having a suspicious conversation, so she grabs David and flees, taking him to Susan's house. While Laura goes to get some stuff back at the house, David moans for Susan to come closer.

After returning to Susan's house, Laura finds that David has brutally murdered Susan and is eating her flesh, and that he has made a full recovery. After cleaning up David, who seems tohave no memory of what happened, Laura paints "He Is Coming" and the Cult's symbol on the wall, hoping to cast the blame on them. She then takes David and flees to a motel, where she learns that they have been declared missing.

Meanwhile, Steve shows Peter a series of newspaper clippings about Laura's past, where her name is revealed to be Anna, and that Laura was being held prisoner by a sexually abusive cult. Steve posits that Laura is suffering a mental breakdown and that she is dangerous, but Paul still expresses sympathy for her. Laura goes to visit her friend Jimmy, a felly escapee of the cult, who is a drug addict living in squalor. Paul, meanwhile, meets with teh psychologist thattreated Laura after she escaped from the cult, and he denies that the cult even existed. Jimmy tells Laura about her time with the cult, including revealing that Laura was impregnated by a demon. David returns, now sick once more.

At another motel, Laura reluctantly seduces an abusive pimp, feeding him to David. Laura dumps his body outside of a church and again paints "He Is Coming" to frame the cult. Meanwhile, Steve and Paul go to see Jimmy, only to find him dead, with several crosses shoved in his mouth, and the words "He Is Coming" painted in blood on his body. The next morning, David narrates a disturbing dream he had to Laura, and Laura tells David that she can't help him anymore, and they go to a nearby Carnival. That night, cultists barge into Laura and David's motel room, and Laura fires blindly at them, killing them all, but when she turns the lights on, its revealed that they weren't cultsits, but Steve and two other officers.

Laura returns to the Cult's house, where she performs a rite to summon the demon, planning to give David to him so he can be saved. Just before the demon takes David, Paul and another officer barge into the room, and the Demon vanishes. Laura tries to stab David, but Paul shoots her dead before she can kill him.

At a hospital, David is lying in bed, and Paul cuts off a piece of his own flesh and feeds it to David. It is revealed through flashback that Paul was the one who killed Jimmy, and that he has been a member of the cult, manipulating Laura. The Demon appears in the hospital room, and David embraces his father as the film ends.

Cast
Andi Matichak as Laura
Emile Hirsch as Paul
Luke David Blumm as David
Cranston Johnson as Steve
Blaine Maye as  Jimmy Naegle
J. Robert Spencer as Dr. Bauhn
Rocco Sisto as Dr. Bradlee
Kristine Nielsen Mrs Naegle
Erin Bradley Dangar as Susan
Adam Stephenson as Father
David Kallaway as Pimp

Production
Filming occurred in February 2020.

Release
RLJE Films acquired the distribution rights for the film, which was released on March 5, 2021.

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 76% based on reviews from 42 critics, with an average rating of 6.40/10 with its consensus stating, "A horror story with unexpected emotional resonance, Son uses its familial focus to counter a certain queasy familiarity".

References

External links
 

2021 films
2021 horror thriller films
Irish horror thriller films
American horror thriller films
English-language Irish films
2020s English-language films
2020s American films