SOVEREIGN

THREE AND A HALF STARS Jerry doesn't believe the government belongs in his life or that of his son, an idea that leads them nowhere good.

DRAMA US English #SOVEREIGN Starring Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay

Writer-director Christian Swegal’s debut feature SOVEREIGN is an ambitious, deeply unsettling mirror held up to our fracturing society. It’s a bloody, brooding, occasionally brilliant study of idealised fatherhood and ideological decay — a small-town action thriller with the intellectual sting of a civics lesson. If that sounds like a lot to pack into one film, it is. But Swegal handles his combustible material with enough control to keep the powder keg smouldering rather than exploding into chaos (final, gut-wrenching scenes notwithstanding).

Set in rural Arkansas, SOVEREIGN traces the parallel lives of two fathers and their sons — men separated by ideology but united by loss. Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman, superb) is a widowed, gun-toting “sovereign citizen,” a true believer in pseudo-legal nonsense and the fantasy of freedom from government control. He's also a loving father to teenage Joe (Jacob Tremblay), a young man increasingly torn between filial devotion and the growing awareness that his father’s world is both morally and literally insane. Across town sits Jerry’s mirror image: police chief John Bouchart (a sturdy Dennis Quaid) and his dutiful son Adam (Thomas Mann), who represents everything Jerry despises — order, obedience, and institutional faith.

When Jerry loses his home to foreclosure, he mounts a crusade against authority, preaching to small gatherings of like-minded believers. To emphasise the point, he and Joe wear white suits and gather a tithe from troubled souls. It soon spirals into paranoia and violence of course, with Jerry dragging his son into a tragedy foretold. Swegal charts their descent with grim precision, filtering America’s epidemic of radical individualism through the lens of family dysfunction. Offerman is electrifying as a man evangelising sovereignty while drowning in his own delusions, spouting legal gibberish with the conviction of scripture. Tremblay, in turn, delivers a heartbreakingly interior performance as the boy who sees too much and understands too late.

SOVEREIGN flirts with didacticism, but Swegal’s touch is more empathetic than polemical. His America — a landscape of strip malls, foreclosed homes, and whitewashed churches where the underground has gone overground — feels both documentary-real and morally scorched. The church sign that reads “All you need is love — and a new gun” says more than any speech could.

While there’s a tendency to simplify the socioeconomic rot that feeds extremism, the emotional gravity of SOVEREIGN — a lament for fathers who fail their sons and a society failing them both — overrides those flaws. It’s assured, urgent, and unnervingly relevant.

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