Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
An episodic film in the tradition of Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch’s new work is a sonata in three movements, the first two variations on a theme and the third both a recapitulation and a resolution. In each, there is either a father or a mother, a brother or a sister—never all four together, always with one or more pieces missing—yet always with the sense that even the absent ones, whether dead or never mentioned, belong somewhere in the larger picture: the portrait of a family that is fractured, flawed, suffocating, absent.
None of this is new territory for Jarmusch (Broken Flowers), yet rarely has he achieved something so balanced and clear-eyed. Father Mother Sister Brother is a game, and like all games, it is deadly serious—a Mike Leigh film made by a neurotic who still knows how to laugh and smile (and sometimes cry).
We begin in the United States, where an adult brother and sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) pay a visit to their widowed father (Tom Waits), who lives alone in the woods. The situation is chilling, the awkwardness palpable, the silence behind every word deafening, and the precision-calibrated style does the rest—though the green-screen car interiors betray the budget’s limitations. Behind the geometric framing and the overt symbolism of objects (a Rolex, real or fake, that will reappear in every episode) lie all the vast, unspoken wounds an egotistical, dishonest man has inflicted on his children, and probably on his wife as well.
We continue to Dublin with a slightly blurred copy of the first episode, this time featuring three women: a wealthy, icy writer played by Charlotte Rampling, who sees her daughters Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps once a year for tea at her home. The pattern is nearly identical: the drive to the house (though here the sisters travel separately, whereas the first pair of siblings rode together), the stiff and embarrassed encounter, the recurring small details (order and disorder, water and tea, food given and eaten), and a farewell that is both depressing and liberating. Here the father is never mentioned, and in the displayed photographs—unlike the first episode—the young daughters are shown from behind, as if rearranging the terms of an equation to arrive at the same sum: a family reality in which silence mutely speaks its opposite, the scream that one of these characters will probably let out just once.
Finally, the third episode in Paris, where twin siblings (the superb Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore) visit their parents’ apartment one last time after their death in a plane crash. Unlike the other characters, these two love each other, talk to each other, embrace, support one another. They enter a home that is genuinely empty (not artificially spare or terrifyingly orderly like the previous ones) only to realize they know nothing about the people who brought them into the world—a discovery made by leafing through old documents, looking at photographs and drawings, touching objects—yet they still feel their presence and their love intact. And the resolution of the conflicts left open in the earlier episodes arrives when the two are filmed first from the front, on the apartment balcony, and then from behind, walking away from the garage where they have stored their parents’ belongings—in order, but amid chaos.
Never more than here (and in ways that recall the recent Petzold) does Jarmusch demonstrate that cinema is above all a matter of space and time—the space of the frame, which in the first two episodes is solitary and in the third doubled or repeated, and the time of a dialogue, an ellipsis, a static shot, or a slow-motion sequence repeated. And therefore of editing, rhythm, interlocking patterns that repeat and shifts that resolve, in the manner of classical cinema but within the forms of a poetic minimalism that found its manifesto in Paterson and now, with this small, splendid, and moving film, its family romance.
