Variety reports Werner Herzog’s reality-based drama film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, starring Chloë Sevigny as Ingrid opposite Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe and Grace Zabriskie, which surprise-screened yesterday to the press at the ongoing Venice Film Festival. The film will be screened to the festival audience today and tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the review is not particularly encouraging. Excerpt courtesy of Variety:

Following so hot on the heels of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans that the latter’s shoe leather will be scuffed, Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, unspooled in Venice as a surprise film, actually repped the lesser surprise, given Lieutenant‘s unexpectedly friendly Lido reception. Teeming with quirky references to Herzog’s oeuvre, My Son will feel like familiar territory for the helmer’s fans, but that doesn’t make it a good film. Though fitfully fascinating, this account of a deranged matricide never gels and will struggle even harder than Rescue Dawn to find an aud. [...]

Even the laziest armchair critic couldn’t fail to spot how Brad reps but the latest in a long line of Herzog protagonists a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, from nearly every character Klaus Kinski played for the helmer through the many eccentrics featured in his docus, right up to Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man. However, despite the innate charisma Shannon, with his Andean-range-long stare, brings to the role, common-or-garden schizophrenic Brad McCullum simply isn’t all that interesting. (Although one rather warms to him when he channels Herzog with an anti-hippie rant — “Stop meditating! Come up with a coherent argument!” — in the Peruvian interlude.)

Pic’s other characters are not a particularly compelling bunch, which is even more disappointing given that they’re played by some pretty big names. Dafoe, Sevigny and Kier seem to be competing to see who can give the most arch, knowingly flat perf, putting invisible air quotes around their renditions of “normal” suburbanites. David Lynch regular Zabriskie (Inland Empire), on the other hand, hams it up royally, particularly in a scene in which she smiles creepily at Brad and Ingrid for what seems like a full minute of screen time.

In fact, at times the pic feels like a joshing, good-natured parody of a Lynch movie, given the big deal made of coffee in one scene, the use of spooky underlighting and the comical, nonsensical appearance of a person of restricted growth (Verne Troyer). Of course, Herzog arguably got there first with the creepy little people in Even Dwarfs Started Small. In any event, Lynch is definitely in on the joke; he exec produced the pic, which is billed as “a David Lynch presentation.”