Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Premise: An anthology of three stories about parents and their adult children.
What Works: Father Mother Sister Brother is very well cast. The movie focuses on three families and each set of characters looks and acts credibly. Everyone in each segment looks like they came from the same gene pool and the actors share mannerisms. The art direction is also quite effective. Each group is costumed in a unform way which helps sell the familial illusion. The locations are also very important to the movie. Each story is set in a specific domestic space and the details of the homes communicate a lot about the families. The middle story is by far the strongest. Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps play siblings who gather at their mother’s home for an annual afternoon of tea and biscuits. This segment is so interesting because of what goes unsaid. In the drive up, Blanchett’s character has car trouble and Krieps’ character carpools with her lesbian partner but makes it appear that she has taken a car service. This story is a sketch of a family who can’t communicate and who are not honest with each other. This creates tension in their meeting; the mundane talk is a cover for dishonesty and internal calculations.
What Doesn’t: Father Mother Sister Brother is a Jim Jarmusch film and like many of Jarmusch’s pictures, this is more about characters than it is about plot or drama. It’s a stretch to call any of the segments of Father Mother Sister Brother a story. There is a very slight narrative shape to each segment but none of them have enough conflict or character depth to really qualify as a story. The action doesn’t lead to a crisis. Each piece feels like the start of a story rather than a complete idea. That in itself is part of the point; these are three sketches of how people live and the ways parents can be remote and mysterious even to their grown children. But the film feels thin. There is a network of parallel visuals and references between the segments, namely the driving scenes, repeated lines of dialogue, and references to specific objects, but those parallels don’t actually connect the segments in a meaningful way. The filmmakers aren’t leading us to any epiphanies about family or legacy.
Bottom Line: There are interesting elements in Father Mother Sister Brother but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The movie has some good performances and the kernel of interesting stories but the picture ultimately feels incomplete.
Episode: #1083 (January 18, 2026)