The Strange Thing About the Johnsons 2011

Sidney Johnson, an acclaimed poet, inadvertently interrupts his 12-year-old son, Isaiah, while he masturbates in 1995. He immediately apologizes and tries to reassure him that such acts can be a natural part of growing up, unaware that Isaiah was masturbating to a photograph of Sidney as a young man.

Fast forward to 2009, during Isaiah’s wedding to Marianne, Isaiah’s mother, Joan, discovers Isaiah secretly performing oral sex on a distressed Sidney. The moment disturbs Joan, yet she struggles to regain her composure. That night, while Joan is in the shower, Sidney leaves a typed memoir beneath her pillow—Cocoon Man: Confessions by Sidney Johnson. The manuscript chronicles Sidney’s own history of incestuous abuse at the hands of his son, a revelation that profoundly unsettles Isaiah when he later reads it and begs him not to print any more copies.

After a New Year’s Eve party in 2010, Isaiah’s behavior grows increasingly erratic, and he lashes out at Marianne. The tension escalates when, one night, as Sidney listens to a self-help tape in the bath, Isaiah bursts in and rapes him. Joan hears Sidney’s screams but does not intervene. The next day, Sidney attempts to leave the house with a secret copy of Cocoon Man, only to be dragged into another confrontation with Isaiah, who gaslights him about their relationship.

Tragically, Sidney runs into the street and is struck and killed by an oncoming van. In the wake of his funeral, Joan confronts Isaiah, convinced the abuse began years earlier during his prom night, a memory she now troubles herself with as she recalls Sidney crying for hours. Isaiah denies the accusation, calling Joan delusional, and in a burst of rage he declares that he loved Sidney more than she ever did. He tries to strangle Joan, who fights back by stabbing him with a knife. He then attempts to force her head into the fireplace, but she strikes him down with a fire iron, tosses the copy of Cocoon Man into the flames, and collapses in tears as she watches it burn.