Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s low-key family anthology speaks from the heart

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

Returning to the serial format of earlier work like Night on Earth (1991), Jim Jarmusch’s prize-winning latest film looks at adult sibling relationships in the long shadow of a parent. It’s typically chill and even low-key, as one might expect from a filmmaker who amusingly kept his shades on even while accepting the Golden Lion at Venice, yet a touching vulnerability settles in, shedding the arch deadpan associated with many of his movies. 

In each of three largely housebound tales, a pair of siblings are feeling out the kind of distance and closeness they want with their parents, with the potential for conflict kept only at a low simmer. They peer at one another quizzically out from the costuming and armature of adulthood, and suggestively, seem most grounded in the third story, one of coming to terms with their parents’ absence. The mix of actors warm to the finely-tuned scene work of what are essentially shorts in an omnibus (which Jarmusch also wrote). 

We open with, basically, two squares: Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik as brother and sister, midcareer normies on their way to see dotty old dad (Tom Waits, a Jarmusch old-timer, his wild-man mojo seemingly ageless). The siblings aren’t especially close themselves, but pull together and trade intel as they face the possibility their father’s marbles might finally be getting away from him. They’re stilted with absentminded Dad, and marbles aside, it seems apparent they never quite “got” him; the film’s rare curveball comes with the funny reveal that Dad clearly knows that, had his own life, and understood that parenthood is a role to play like any other. 

The awareness of roles – and the slight absurdity of their persistence – carries into the second chapter, a visit by two British women living in Dublin (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) to their mother (Charlotte Rampling) for afternoon tea. Blanchett shrinks here from her usual grandeur to play a heritage council worker who seems to embrace regressing to prim girlhood with her olympian-gazed novelist mother; Krieps glides through a more familiar turn as a free spirit, here hiding her relationship with another woman. Jarmusch’s short-form structure here helps avoid the expectation of a cloying resolution and allows the portraiture sit with its bittersweet core.  

Finally – and it does land elegantly as a conclusion while being fully formed – newer Jarmusch additions Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play twins making a final visit to their parents’ empty Paris flat. The reason is that their father and mother have died in the crash of a small plane, on some kind of adventure their children barely knew about, which bookends this with the first chapter in its sense of parental mysteries that their offspring can’t or don’t quite notice. But these siblings, so beautifully played by Moore and Sabbat with a mellow flow, keep showing their deep love of all that they did and did not understand about cool mom and dad (with an almost nostalgic view of cosmopolitan Paris as a simpatico setting). 

If all the stories show how visiting with parents can feel also feel like a visit with one’s past selves, the third one feels like an opening out to the future, in the gentle sunlight of a dawning new day. Jarmusch’s new film is decidedly understated, accruing its force with a virtuoso’s ability to modulate dramatic (or dramedic) notes and switch up perspectives on a theme of homecoming that’s challenging by virtue of how very common and familiar it is. He’s aided in that by an all-star team of editor Affonso Gonçalves and cinematographers of two past career high points, Frederick Elmes (Broken Flowers, 2005) and Yorick Le Saux (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013).  

For all the puttering about in memory-filled homes, Jarmusch (who composed the film’s warm score with Anika) also harkens here and there to the rhythms of films like often overlooked The Limits of Control (2009). That’s not only because of the theme-and-variation approach, but also the soothing sense of movement and flow – most notably in a drive in the final chapter, and in the periodic, almost mystical appearances of skateboarders throughout. The fact that the skaters feel endearingly out-of-place makes it feel like a bit of an artistic imprint, something Jarmusch (who has a filmmaker brother, Tom) himself brings to the family table to throw things off a little. What Jarmusch has called his “quiet film” speaks with clarity as one from the heart.