Name: & Sons
Director: Pablo Trapero
Genre: Drama
Released: 2026-09-18T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 119 min
Cast: Bill Nighy, Noah Jupe, George MacKay, Johnny Flynn, Imelda Staunton

A reclusive novelist, convinced his body is finally giving out, calls his grown sons back to the townhouse he almost never leaves. They arrive braced for the scene such summonses usually produce — an apology, a deathbed truce, some ledger of old wounds finally settled. What their father offers instead is a secret, outlandish and possibly untrue, that reorders everything they believed about how their family was made.

That confession is the engine of “& Sons,” and it is an unusual thing to hand an audience. The film asks you to sit inside a dying man’s story and decide, in the moment, whether he is lying, deluded, or telling a truth stranger than any lie. Pablo Trapero directs, and his control shows in the surfaces — shuttered rooms, low amber light, a house that feels less lived-in than embalmed.

Bill Nighy plays Andrew Dyer, the writer, and the casting reads as an argument about withholding. Nighy has spent a career making charm look like armor, and here the armor is the role — a man who turned two decades of public silence into both a weapon and a hiding place. Around him the film gathers the people that silence damaged. Noah Jupe is the youngest son who sits at the center of the secret; George MacKay and Johnny Flynn are the elder brothers who come home suspicious; Imelda Staunton is the wife Dyer let slip away; Dominic West arrives for a pivotal late turn.

The film is Trapero’s first in English, and the shift is more than a matter of language. His Argentine work lives inside institutions and class friction — a prison, a courtroom, the true-crime portrait of a bourgeois family running a kidnapping business — shot with a documentarian’s nerve for how power moves through a room. “& Sons” trades Buenos Aires for a wood-panelled Manhattan literary world of first editions and quiet inherited money. The open question is whether his eye for social rot survives the move indoors, into a milieu built to flatter itself.

The production wears its prestige plainly. Costume and set lean on tasteful decay — good tailoring gone soft, a study curated like a small private museum, the particular hush that money makes once it has stopped needing to announce itself. Trapero and his co-writer, Sarah Polley, adapting David Gilbert’s novel, use that surface as a trap. The house looks like the kind of place where truth is preserved; the drama is about how completely a beautiful room can be furnished with lies.

Trapero shoots the reunion like a chamber piece. Figures are arranged across wide, static frames; conversations run the length of a room; the camera would rather watch a face decide whether to speak than cut away to the reaction. It is a grammar of patience, and it loads enormous weight onto small movements — a glance held a beat too long, a drink poured to fill a silence. The style trusts the actors, which is another way of saying it trusts the secret to survive being examined this closely.

Gilbert’s novel earned its reputation on ventriloquism, narrated by an envious family friend and thick with the machinery of a writer’s reputation. Polley’s screenplay pulls that apparatus back toward the family itself, and the risk is legible. What works as unreliable narration on the page has to become something a face can carry, and the film stakes almost everything on whether Nighy’s stillness can hold a claim the audience may never believe.

The gamble is the secret itself. Take Dyer at his word and the film tilts toward speculative fiction, a domestic drama with a science-fiction premise smuggled into the study. Refuse him, and everything rests on whether the performances can sustain a hollow center. Early festival responses split along exactly that seam — drawn to the audacity of the swing, unconvinced by where it lands. The film does not resolve the doubt so much as live inside it, which is either the point or the problem, depending on the viewer.

A small production note suits the character. Nighy has said he would not watch the film before its premiere — a refusal that fits a man more at ease authoring a version of events than facing the finished one.

Bill Nighy as reclusive novelist Andrew Dyer in the drama & Sons — Bill Nighy in *& Sons* (2026)

The credited principals are Nighy, Jupe, MacKay, Flynn, Staunton and West, with Anna Geislerová and Arthur Conti in support. Trapero produces through his own Matanza Cine alongside Infinity Hill, Maven Screen Media and Bankside Films, part of an international slate spanning Argentina, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Chile. The film runs 119 minutes and held its world premiere in the Special Presentations strand at the Toronto International Film Festival, with later stops in London and Rome.

“& Sons” is in United Kingdom and Irish cinemas now, released by Icon Film Distribution, and reaches Australian screens on the heels of that run. Spanish audiences get the film, retitled “Sus hijos,” on September 18. No North American theatrical date has been confirmed.