Mother and Son is a slow, soft, and sad poem about the last day of a woman weakened by disease, and about the loving son who cares for her in her remote cabin home. Formal elements converge to reinforce the elegiac tone: the whispering wind, crashing waves, sea-gull cries, and other natural sounds recall the glissandi of violins; the images, distorted by filming through painted glass panes, mirrors, and special lenses, are reminiscent of German Romantic painting; the pace of the film verges on stillness, as though fixing on the moment between life and death, consciousness and oblivion. In the triumphantly pre-Freudian universe of the film, the parent is a literal burden who is carried through the world by her son in a sort of reverse pieta.