FILM OF THE WEEK: Father Mother Sister Brother - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother unfolds like a series of visits where no-one fully relaxes. People arrive, sit down, pour tea or water, circle the edges of conversation, and leave more guarded than when they arrived. It is a film attuned to the small evasions that make up family life, the half-truths and omissions that protect individuals, that keep fragile relationships polite and intact while ensuring emotional distance is never truly bridged. In scenes between parents and their adult children, and scenes between siblings, love is present, but maintained carefully rather than offered full-heartedly.

The opening section, carried by Adam Driver and Tom Waits, moves with a dry, mischievous rhythm. A brother and sister visit their father, spending the lengthy car ride worrying about his calamitous life, his financial woes, his need. Meanwhile, the camera cuts to him seemingly making his house appear messier, covering stylish furniture with stained blankets, setting the stage for a performance of frailty and incapacity. Upon arrival, he hobbles around offering meagre forms of hospitality, offering platitudes of being proud of his children while remaining oblivious to the realities of their lives. The siblings play their own roles, pretending not to be suspicious of their father’s lifestyle. The humour is precise and observational. Chairs are shifted, cups are refilled, anecdotes begin and falter, the characters needlessly change position in the room while not moving emotionally an inch.

What lingers is not the joke but the quiet agreement sustaining it. The son brings money without naming it as such. The father accepts help while pretending to refuse it and maybe not needing it. Each scripted line, fulfilment of a role, adherence to the predetermined script protects the other from a fuller reckoning. The motive for the father’s fiction remains unclear, but it allows his children to express care through worry and money, and maybe that’s enough.

The Dublin-set middle chapter shifts the tone without abandoning the pattern. Three women not originally from the city have moved there, ostensibly to be close to each other but only meeting once a year. The performances heighten. Dialogue is sharper, more brittle, the silences heavier. Cate Blanchett’s Timothea still calls her mother “Mummy,” a word that suggests intimacy, infantilisation and a cloying desire for a woman who remains firmly out of reach. Charlotte Rampling is icily controlled, polite but with a formality that lands like violence.

Both daughters arrive already mid-performance. One constructs success out of designer props and lies about a life the mother has no access to; the other withholds anything that might be dismissed or diminished; the two sisters are separated by their opposite personas. Their competition feels old, rehearsed, impossible to step out of. Jokes, even praise, come tinged with unacknowledged edge, and a history defined by a mother who withholds affection, interest, even her flourishing writing career, when it appears, is faintly destabilising. What emerges is a portrait of adulthood that has not quite shaken off the hierarchies and needs of childhood - the need to be seen, the fear of the judgement or rejection that may follow.

This section is less openly funny, lingering in silence and etiquette, carrying a sharper emotional edge and without the first section's sense of siblings being on one team.

The final movement, set in Paris, opens outward. Where the earlier sections are structured around visits to living parents, this one unfolds in their absence. The twins, played by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat, return to an apartment that is no longer inhabited but still dense with traces. The rhythm slows. The camera lingers. Conversation loosens. The tenderness that emanates contrasts with the previous sections, exploring loss but also deeply felt and openly expressed affection. The twins are alone now, but the fracture in their family reframes the idea of distance between parents and children in ways that are loving and human.

Music threads these shifts in tone. The film opens with Dusty Springfield's ‘Spooky’, its smooth, slightly elusive mood capturing the uncertainty that runs through the early encounters. It closes with Nico’s ‘These Days’, which carries a quieter, more reflective register. The song does not resolve anything, but it allows for a bittersweet form of acceptance.

The film is understated, subtle, and not scared to linger in silence, awkwardness, and inaction in ways that may infuriate or bore some viewers. But there’s a beauty and compelling quality to this examination of family members who remain, in fundamental ways, strangers to one another. On paper, this distance sounds like loss, but the film recognises some relationships’ need for lies and silences. It recognises the ways people manage intimacy through distance, how they construct versions of themselves and demand performances from others, not out of cruelty, but as way of ensuring the connection survives. People misunderstand each other, protect each other, invent for each other. The gaps remain. So does the care.

Written & directed by Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography by Frederick Elmes, Yorick Le Saux. Edited by Affonso Gonçalves. Music by Jim Jarmusch, Anikka.
Starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Sarah Greene, Françoise Lebrun. 111 mins

• Out now. Watch the trailer below: