Father Mother Sister Brother
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Jim Jarmusch. Cast: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore, Luke Sabbat, Françoise Lebrun. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. In Brief:
Jarmusch in his least appealing mode. Three incomplete ideas lazily composited. Drab filmmaking, too.
VOR:②
I love stories about how parents' lives are bigger than their kids and kids who don't get that. But what a wan, ill-made spin on that theme.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a thinner movie that recently took the top prize at one of the three major European festivals. I might reach back to The Shape of Water, though at least that was trying some unusual and memorable things, however misguidedly, or Somewhere, even if I guess that one succeeded on its own hazy, hyper-niche terms. I also get the response of people who love those two. That's harder to do with Father Mother Sister Brother, if indeed anyone loves it, including that reportedly fractious Venice jury.* I certainly understand viewers who find this film agreeable or ephemerally touching, even if I found it neither, but is this any kind of aspirational achievement, much less at global scale?
To watch Father Mother Sister Brother (a title as whiffy as Somewhere) is, at least from my seat, to watch what the movie is trying but not managing to be, with remarkably little texture or finesse. It also involves picking up fairly broad signals of what's on the movie's mind. Parents can be limited or manipulative, in ways that can turn siblings subtly against each other and/or make necessary allies of them. Or some siblings can prove to be lifelong, quasi-fond quasi-acquaintances. And some can be deep emotional resources and consolations to each other. And some parents want things from their children that they're awkward about requesting, but honestly, is it really so hard just to give our parents, or most of our parents, a little more of what they're seeking?
If you're energized by these questions, or if they've been forced into vividness by circumstances in your own life, or you just like the sparkly cast or vibe with this director (and what I would call his career-long swings between thrilling ambition and laziness played cool), Father Mother Sister Brother might go down well. But as scripted and executed, I just see deficiency after deficiency, crutch after crutch. I'm reminded of a grad school colleague who received a student paper that started with the not-quite-sentence, "Families, which can be large or small." I occasionally sensed Jarmusch bringing some tangible feeling to this project, but in proportion to his resources, I'm not convinced he got much farther.
Tom Waits gives the film's most (only?) interesting performance as the father in the first section of this triptych movie. The story nonetheless stumbles by over-signaling throughout (in editing, in dialogue, in unsubtly "subtle" design touches) what could have been a tart comic punchline at the finish. This first act also wastes no time introducing us to the film's shaky photography—the lensing and depth-of-field management inside the car are flat-out ugly—and its unreliable hand with actors. Mayim Bialik in particular defaults to on-the-nose line readings and blatantly indicative gestures that flatten what might have been layered in her character or in this scenario... though she may share my uncertainty about whether Jarmusch was even looking for layers.
The second section is the weakest, finding an even more synthetic color palette and lighting regime in Dublin than the first part did in New Jersey, and coaxing nothing-burger performances from a first-gear Charlotte Rampling and an uninspired, affectedly "mousy" Cate Blanchett. Pink-haired Vicky Krieps fares a little better with her low-key yet still flagrant passive aggression, but the lunchtime reunion of this all-female family nucleus goes nowhere that wasn't already telegraphed from the very first beats.
The Parisian lighting in the final episode at least offers some visual relief. The sorting through surprising detritus in the apartment of two recently deceased parents yields some emotional resonance within this episode, and even feeds some of it retroactively into the prior two. But actors Indya Moore and Luke Sabbat aren't furnishing much that isn't already implicit in this mini-tale as written, and the line between running on vibes and running on fumes is tricky to draw.
I feel sure that, as is his wont, Jarmusch will describe Father Mother Sister Brother as an homage to some vastly more delicate and superior chronicler of fragile, intrafamilial emotion; Ozu seems the likeliest suspect, but we'll find out. I say don't buy it. Some critics lent a hand to making something of Jarmusch's almost insolently insubstantial zombie movie The Dead Don't Die in 2019. While variety is the spice of life, I thought they worked much harder than Jarmusch did to dress up a single-punchline movie that could draft easily on ambient political currents in the US (and almost everywhere) so as to pass itself off as a commentary. Father Mother Sister Brother is even weaker and similarly outsources to the audience the work of generating emotion or significance—this time based on our own histories of domestic relation, much like The Dead Don't Die remora'd itself onto its audience's presumed, pre-existing sense of dead-end social and political driftlessness. It's almost as if Jarmusch is asking us to make these movies for him, after dropping tony casts and sketched premises in our laps, then leaving for a smoke break from which he never returns.
But hey, Alexander Payne liked it. Grade:C–
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
* As is her wont, the exemplary Jessica Kiang came closer than I thought possible to making me rethink my grouchy response. I still said what I said, but do check out her review, particularly if you rolled your eyes at mine.
