New York Film Festival Review: ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ from Jim Jarmusch

Father Mother Sister Brother

Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Lion award winner at the Venice Film Festival is a quiet, seemingly unadventurous film. Nevertheless it packs a punch. Instead of bombs exploding, Jarmusch employs subtext, nuance and silences in Father Mother Sister Brother to convey family alienation: slight gestures, a raised eyebrow here, a smile there, and stilted, abrupt pauses.

Jarmusch talked during the Q&A at the film’s screening at the 63rd New York Film Festival about such captured details of human behavior. To focus on nuances and what they reveal becomes much more difficult to film than “12 zombies coming out of the ground.” Certainly, the laconic characters portrayed superbly by Charlotte Rampling, Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits, Vicky Krieps, the beautiful Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat hold one’s attention as masters of understatement. Indeed, Jarmusch forces us to carefully observe them. We watch because of what they don’t say, as they ride the pauses between the things they do say.

Three family scenarios

Jarmusch’s triptych of meet-ups among family members rings with authenticity. Principally because Jarmusch wrote the parts for the actors he selected, the dialogue and situations unfold seamlessly. Stilted silences fill in the gaps between parents and children when both generations front about their personal reality. How often do we cut off 80% of what we would like to say to “keep the peace,” “mask our true emotions,” or “get over?” All of these motives apply in Jarmusch’s portrait of family dysfunction that lacks the raving that sometimes occurs at the holidays.

The film divides familial separation into three scenarios in three locales. In the last sequence, the separation has no hope of reconciliation. The possibility exists with the other two sequences. In the first scenario, a slick, quirky father (Tom Waits) hosts his children (Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik). As they drive to his house in a wooded area by a lake, the brother and sister discuss their father’s difficulty making ends meet. They also consider whether his loopiness reveals dementia.

They confess that they have given in to their father’s requests for money. Bialik’s character humorously comments that the frequency and amount her brother gave him may have contributed to his divorce. Then she rues the insulting remark and apologizes. Though her brother doesn’t take offense, their conversation reveals that the siblings feel awkward with each other.

This ramps up when they sit down with their father, who offers them only water to drink. They assume his shabby, messy living room signifies he is still struggling with purposelessness after the loss of his wife, their mother. But we see the reality when the children leave. The father transforms into someone else. Not only have the grown children underestimated their father, they’ve completely misread his personality, character and intentions.

Irony and humor abound as the film views parents through their children’s perspectives. Indeed, Jarmusch reminds us that the Italian proverb “You have to eat 100 pounds of salt with someone to understand them,” isn’t an exaggeration. He has fun with this thematic thrust in the next scenario as well.

Droll and understated

The second interlude takes place in Ireland, where a wealthy novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) hosts a formal tea for her grown daughters who live in Dublin (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett). The lush setting and table filled with all the proper treats for an afternoon tea impresses. However, the sophistication of the setting adds to the cold atmosphere as the women playact at niceties. The daughters appear at opposite ends of their lives. Krieps’ pink-haired character contrasts with Blanchett’s in glasses and cropped hair, regressed to dour blandness. Rampling’s remote, regal mom presides austerely.

In an earlier phone conversation Krieps’ character has alluded to a relationship with another woman. But none of the interesting frequencies in their real lives come to the the table. Instead, they drink tea politely, accomplishing a duty to their blood. Truly, folks may be related by DNA, but their likenesses, interests, values and personalities may have little or no alignment. We do choose our friends but we are stuck with family relations.

A shift to seriousness

Interestingly, the third segment returns to the theme of children not understanding parents who grew up in a different time. In Paris, two lovely-looking fraternal twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) make a return visit to their late parents’ spacious apartment. In the empty apartment and at their parents’ storage unit they feel the impact of the parents’ plane-crash deaths. They marvel at their parents’ belongings, which have little significance to them but had meaning to their parents who kept them and paid for their storage.

In this scenario Jarmusch reveals love between siblings as emblematic of their parents’ loving relationship. He also reveals their love for their parents, whom they admire as they go through a few old pictures, reminisce and mourn. However, what remains? They have memories and the things in the storage unit whose meaning is lost to them. What to dow ith the stuff?

The poignance of the last scenario contrasts with the other two. It also lightly holds a greater message that Jarmusch doesn’t shove down our throats.

Father Mother Sister Brother profoundly explores family, human complication, and the mystery of every human being. We may not even be knowable to ourselves, let alone our relatives.

Father Mother Sister Brother releases in U.S. theaters at a perfect time for family get-togethers, December 24, 2025. It will stream later on MUBI.