In a seaside city that feels unnamed to the outside world, a father and his son Aleksei share a rooftop apartment that looks out over the water and the quiet pulse of daily life below. The Father, once a combat helicopter pilot, now guides Aleksei as he attends military school where he trains to become a sports trainer. Although the Father’s youth and the easy understanding between them suggest a close, almost sagelike rapport, their different life experiences gradually pull them apart. This growing distance fuels Aleksei’s nighttime terrors, and the rift between father and son becomes the emotional core that haunts the story.
Sokurov’s film is frequently described as plotless, yet it orchestrates two distinct narrative modes that coil around one another. One mode is circular: the film opens and closes with Father comforting Aleksei after a nightmare, a containment that frames the entire experience. The other mode is linear, embedded inside the circular frame, tracing a weekend that unfolds with a deceptive simplicity yet carries the weight of all that has separated them. The visual design of the framing scenes—Father sitting in the snow in his pajamas, the quietness that surrounds these intimate moments—coupled with intertextual references to famous painterly depictions of angels (for instance, Rembrandt’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) position Father as Aleksei’s guardian angel, returning from the wounds of combat to protect and console his son. This depiction of almost filial closeness has led some viewers to read subtextual dimensions of intimacy into their bond, highlighting the film’s delicate handling of love, dependence, and protection.
The linear thread narrows its gaze to a two‑day span that Aleksei stitches into a single, nightmarish sequence. Within this frame, Aleksei and Father encounter two young men around Aleksei’s age—Sasha and Fyodor—each effectively fatherless for different reasons, their missing fathers echoing in their own distress and shaping the emotional weather of the city as the two days pass. Parallel to these meetings, Aleksei’s unnamed girlfriend ends their relationship, and Aleksei’s reluctance to embrace fatherhood becomes a point of friction that strains both his personal life and his bond with the Father. The convergence of these threads—the intimate, almost celestial care of a guardian figure and the gritty, everyday ache of unfulfilled responsibility—gives the film its quiet, persistent ache.
Ultimately, Father and Son emerges as a profound allegory of paternal love and filial regret, a somber meditation on a bond that can be both intensely protective and potentially constraining. It functions as a contemporary variation on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, reframing that age‑old story through Sokurov’s restrained, contemplative lens. The result is a meditation that invites reflection on what it means to love a child, to bear witness to growth and failure, and to navigate the thin line between guardian and witness in a world that often feels both intimate and tenuous.
