Winner of the Golden Lion Best Film prize at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Father Mother Sister Brother is the eagerly-awaited new film from Jim Jarmusch. Funny, tender and astutely observed, this is an intimate exploration of the universal intricacies of family dynamics. Starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat.
Told in the form of a triptych divided into chapters set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, each story concerns the relationships between adult children, their somewhat distant parent (or parents), and each other. Blending remarkable performances from its ensemble cast with Jarmusch’s wry and idiosyncratic observations of everyday life, the iconic indie director’s latest serves as a timely reminder that you can choose your friends and your lovers, but you can’t choose your family.
The Garden Cinema View:
Jim Jarmusch’s return to the triptych-structures of his early work earned him a surprise Golden Lion last year. Arguably the most low-key winner of Venice’s top prize since Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere in 2010, Father Mother Sister Brother is a film that works according to its own (slow-paced) rhythms, and gentle absurdism – ever more mellow as Jarmusch himself matures. These three family meetups, full of unspoken history, stilted attempts at connection, and mild passive aggressiveness, recalls something of Yasujiro Ozu’s family dramas. But the pointed repetition of peculiar moments and abstracted lines of dialogue is imbued with a strange humour which is typical of Jarmusch. There is something in that particular insistence on the nature of words which is like modernist poetry. And perhaps the three settings: rural New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, also attest to this artistic lineage.
