In a departure from the earlier features’ intense focus on a single protagonist, The Son intertwines the stories of two men of different generations: a middle-aged carpenter and his young apprentice whose relationship returns the Dardennes to the father-son dynamic of La promesse, but with the crucial difference that these two men are bonded not by family, but by the blood of a past crime. A meditation on the relation between ethics and time, The Son intensely observes two people whose exact relationship only becomes clear over time and is more overdetermined that it seems at first glance.

The Dardennes’ first fictional effort was this short, dark satire about the modern obsession with speed. Set in the world of local television news, Il court… manages to link the Futurists’ celebration of technology with two of the Dardennes’ signature concerns: the sharing and dispersal of information in the contemporary world addressed in their early work, and the human experience of time and duration explored in their recent features.