Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch has always been the hipster’s poet of American indie cinema, the guy who makes you feel that cool is a moral position, and that languid pacing isn’t laziness but a kind of philosophical stance. With Father Mother Sister Brother, he’s made what may be his most nakedly emotional film, though “naked” is relative when you’re dealing with a filmmaker who keeps his sunglasses on at awards ceremonies—even when accepting the Golden Lion at Venice. The affectation is part of the package, and by now we know that behind those shades there’s a sensibility that has always been gentler than his downtown New York mystique would suggest. He came up in the early eighties with Stranger Than Paradise, a film that made plotlessness feel like a revolution, and he’s spent four decades refining an aesthetic of cool detachment that somehow never curdles into coldness. His films drift, they meander, they stop to watch someone smoke a cigarette or stare out a window, and yet they accumulate feeling the way dust accumulates on furniture—slowly, invisibly, until one day you notice it’s everywhere.
This is a triptych film, three linked episodes about adult siblings visiting their parents, and it recalls his 1991 Night on Earth in structure if not in spirit. That earlier film had a comic bravado, a love of oddball encounters and chance meetings—taxi drivers and passengers thrown together by fate in cities around the world. This one is softer, more inward, almost painfully so at times. Jarmusch has called it his “anti-action film,” which is the kind of thing directors say when they’re worried audiences will find their movie boring. But it isn’t boring—it’s something more unsettling than that. It’s a film about the elaborate performances we put on for the people who are supposed to know us best, and how families become theaters where everyone’s running a different play. The action, such as it is, happens beneath the surface, in the gap between what people say and what they mean, between the faces they present and the selves they hide.
The first episode, titled simply “Father,” drops us into a car with Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik), siblings driving through snow to visit their elderly father in some nondescript Northeastern town. They’re midcareer normies, as the kids might say, and the casting is slyly perfect: Driver brings his awkward physical gravity, that quality he has of seeming too large for any space he occupies, and Bialik, so different from her sitcom persona, plays Emily with a nervous watchfulness that suggests years of family disappointment compressed into careful politeness. These two don’t seem particularly close to each other, but they’ve formed an alliance of sorts, pooling intel before facing the old man. Emily wonders aloud how their father survives without social security since their mother passed; she doesn’t know that Jeff has been secretly supporting him. Jeff arrives with a box of expensive groceries, the gesture of a dutiful son who has accepted his role as invisible benefactor. He doesn’t tell his sister. Why not? The film doesn’t explain, and Jarmusch isn’t interested in explaining. Families are full of these private arrangements, these unspoken agreements to maintain fictions that everyone half-believes.
But here’s the twist that makes the episode sing: the father—played by Tom Waits, that magnificent craggy ruin of a man—doesn’t need any of it. Before his children arrive, we see him deliberately messing up his otherwise tidy house, parking a junker in the driveway to hide his actual functional car. He’s performing the role of the dotty, struggling old dad they expect him to be, and there’s something almost tender in the deception—he’s giving them what they came for, the satisfaction of being needed, of being good children. When Emily spots a Rolex on his wrist, he dismisses it as a fake replica. The old man forgets about Jeff’s recent divorce, seeming not to care about their lives at all, and you can read this as senility or as something more deliberate—a refusal to play the role of the invested patriarch. After they leave, satisfied with their filial duty, he cleans up the house, gets in his real car, and drives off to meet a friend. Waits plays this with the knowing wit of someone who understood long ago that parenthood is just another gig, and that children never really see their parents—not in the ways that matter. The comedy is dry as dust and cuts like paper. Jarmusch has always loved Waits, has used him before in Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes, and there’s a sense here that he’s giving the old wild man a role that comments on aging itself, on the freedom that comes when you stop caring what your children think of you.
“Mother,” the Dublin section, shifts us to another register entirely, but the theme of performance and concealment carries through with an almost musical precision. Two sisters—Timothea (Cate Blanchett, nicknamed “Tim”) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps)—gather for their annual high tea with their mother, a successful novelist played by Charlotte Rampling with that imperial gaze of hers, the one that seems to be assessing everyone’s worthiness to exist in her presence. This is the only day of the year they actually see each other, though they all live in Dublin. The distance isn’t geographical; it’s something deeper, something nobody wants to name. You get the feeling this annual ritual is less about connection than about fulfilling an obligation, checking a box that allows everyone to believe they still have a family.
Blanchett does something unexpected here: she shrinks. We’re used to seeing her dominate the frame, commandeer scenes with that theatrical grandeur she wields so effortlessly, but her Tim is a heritage council worker who seems to regress to prim girlhood in her mother’s company, as if decades of adult accomplishment simply evaporate in the presence of maternal judgment. Her car malfunctions on the way—she desperately tries to contact her insurance but ultimately drives on, terrified of being late. Even car trouble can’t be admitted; it would be a failure, a crack in the façade. Krieps’s Lilith, meanwhile, asks her friend Jeanette (Sarah Greene, in a brief but perfectly pitched appearance) to pretend to be an Uber driver, hiding her real circumstances from her mother and sister. Everyone in this family is running a con. The question is whether they’re fooling anyone, or whether the cons are simply the price of admission, the agreed-upon fictions that make the gathering possible at all.
During tea, the mother inquires about their lives with that particular maternal scrutiny that makes children of any age feel like they’re being graded. Timothea announces her promotion to the city’s preservation council, but Lilith interrupts with news about the “influencers” in her community—a term that leaves both mother and sister bewildered, a generational gap opening up like a crack in fine china. Lilith is wearing a Rolex; she insists it’s a fake replica. There’s that watch again, the recurring emblem of something being passed off as something else. Later, Timothea escapes to the bathroom, and we see her overwhelmed by emotion—the mask slipping, just for a moment, when nobody’s watching. It’s a small scene, almost throwaway, but Blanchett fills it with such compressed feeling that you understand everything about this woman’s life, everything the polite conversation at the tea table was designed to conceal. The episode ends with the three women waiting in silence by the front door for Lilith’s fake Uber. Rampling barely needs to act; her face does the work of a thousand unspoken criticisms. The silence isn’t awkward so much as inevitable—they’ve run out of performance, and without it, there’s nothing left to say.
But it’s the third episode, “Sister Brother,” that brings the film into focus and gives it its devastating quiet power. Twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) have come to Paris following the death of their parents in a plane crash in the Azores—off on some adventure, apparently, that their children knew nothing about. As they drive to the now-empty apartment, they try to reconnect through shared memories, circling around the mystery of who their parents actually were. Moore and Sabbat are wonderful together, their twinship expressed in shared rhythms, in the easy way they move around each other, finishing each other’s sentences or letting silences stretch without discomfort. There’s a warmth here that was absent from the earlier episodes, a genuine affection that makes the coming revelations land harder.
At the apartment, Billy shows Skye what he’s found while cleaning out: old photos, childhood drawings, their father’s Rolex. And then the revelations that change everything: multiple fake IDs and a fake marriage certificate. Who were these people? The parents who raised them with such apparent warmth and unconventionality were living under assumed identities, running from something or toward something their children never knew about. The landlord, Madame Gautier, interrupts them—and here Jarmusch gives us the great Françoise Lebrun, that weathered icon of French cinema whose face carries decades of screen memory, from Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore to Gaspar Noé’s Vortex. She reveals that the parents died owing three months’ rent, and that she personally prevented the insurance company from seizing their belongings. This act of kindness from a stranger illuminates how little the twins understood about the practical realities of their parents’ lives. Someone outside the family knew them better, or at least knew different things—the secrets families keep from each other leak out to neighbors and landlords and friends.
Later, driving through Paris in the gentle light of a new day, Skye and Billy visit a warehouse where the old furniture has been stored—the material remnants of a life that was, it turns out, largely fiction. But here’s what Jarmusch understands, and what gives the film its aching beauty: it doesn’t matter. The love was real, even if the names weren’t. The twins grieve not for the people their parents pretended to be, but for the parents they experienced, whoever those people actually were. Identity is a strange thing; we think we know someone because we know their name, their history, their habits, but what we really know is how they made us feel, and that’s something no fake ID can counterfeit.
The Rolex appears in all three episodes—claimed as fake in the first two, revealed as genuine (alongside those fake IDs) in the third—and it becomes the film’s central metaphor for the authenticity we hide and the performances we maintain. In “Father,” wealth masquerades as poverty; in “Mother,” poverty masquerades as wealth; in “Sister Brother,” an entire identity dissolves into questions that will never be answered. Jarmusch shot the film with two cinematographers from previous career highs: Frederick Elmes, who gave Broken Flowers its wistful autumnal glow, and Yorick Le Saux, whose work on Only Lovers Left Alive turned Detroit into a vampire’s melancholy dreamscape. The result is consistently beautiful in a way that never calls attention to itself—not easy to achieve when your scenes are mostly people sitting in rooms not saying much. The score, composed by Jarmusch himself with Anika, wraps around the images with a warmth that the characters themselves can rarely express. There are also, throughout the film, mysterious appearances by skateboarders—gliding through the background, seemingly unconnected to anything, figures of grace and motion in a movie about people who are mostly stuck. It’s a bit of Jarmusch whimsy, his artistic signature, and it works precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. Families are like that too: there’s always some strange element someone brings to the table, something that doesn’t belong but somehow does.
The film has the shape of a triptych altarpiece, the kind where each panel illuminates the others, and viewing them together produces a meaning none possesses alone. Jarmusch has said he wrote it in three weeks, and there’s something appropriately humble about that—this isn’t a film straining for profundity, it’s a film that finds profundity in the strain of ordinary family gatherings, in the exhausting work of pretending to be the people our relatives expect us to be. By the time the credits rolled, I found myself reaching for my phone, not to learn the truth about my mother, but just to hear her voice—whatever truth it might be concealing, whatever performance she might still be giving after all these years. That’s what Jarmusch has done here: he’s made a film about the distance between people who love each other, and somehow that distance feels like the closest thing to intimacy we’re likely to get.
