Families really are the worst, until you lose them
dir: Jim Jarmusch
2025
That sneaky director, Jim Jarmusch, maker of cool films for over 40 years, member of the secret Sons of Lee Marvin lookalike society, tried to sneak one past me. How did I not hear about this flick, that he had a new flick out, huh?
Father Mother Sister Brother is more like three short films wearing an overcoat and a fedora pretending to be one movie. Given the title you’d think it’s got something to do with families and such. And they do, but they aren’t directly linked or using the same actors in different set ups and scenarios. If they are united by anything, it is quantum entanglement where actions and connections can occur at a spooky distance.
If you know the tempo, the measure, the tenor that Jarmusch usually works in / with, this will all seem familiar even if the scenarios and dialogue aren’t. You either like the way he works or you rejected it a long while ago. Those new to his films would watch this flick and probably be perplexed by it, and why everything seems so odd.
And if you’re a long term watcher and appreciator of his movies, watching the first segment and seeing Tom Waits pop up as the chap who puts the father in the “Father” sequence would be delightful, seeing as Tom is one of a long list of people Jarmusch has worked with over the years, and a welcome one to see again (even if his character is a bit of a prick).
Two siblings, played by Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver, who seem like okay people, are driving to visit their dad, who they clearly don’t see or hear from very often. They seem to get along fairly well, with each other. The dad lives in a fairly rural area, and they look very much like city people.
As they’re travelling towards him, the odd thing is they’re discussing what his health must be like, whether he’s doing okay, how it is that he gets by financially, and we’re watching him move things around at his place. He’s not cleaning up; he’s actually trying to make the place look like more of a dump, messier. He’s covering up the nice furniture and cluttering things up.
The daughter and son don’t seem like they know their dad that much, nor do they seem particularly close. They both have families of their own, though the son seems like he’s recently been divorced.
When they get there, they have polite niceties, and very little else. It’s awkward, but not in a way that’s overamped, or dramatic (for what isn’t said). It’s not a tense atmosphere, just… lacking. Any time either of them asks a question, or gives an opportunity to connect with the cagey old man, he rebuffs them, he declines to engage, really. When he, playing the ideal host, offers them water, he can only think to offer a toast to his dearly departed wife, their mother.
Because so little is said, so little is observed, we rush to fill the gaps given all the absences. This is a family where the dad really wasn’t involved in his kids lives that much, so that with the mother passing, there’s no glue keeping this family together anymore, other than routine and the expectation of what families should do. It’s not acrimony, it’s not estrangement due to past abuses or betrayals. There’s just… little connecting these people anymore.
Except money. There’s a revelation left till the very end which works as a kind of punchline, but it would be overstating it to say it represents any kind of twist. It’s telegraphed so completely, continuously, that it’s just the other shoe you were waiting to drop, finally dropping.
When the daughter notices the Rolex on the dad’s arm, he’s embarrassed, and mutters about it being a ‘fugazi’, as in, a cheap knock-off, but he still covers it up. It must have been one of the things he forgot to hide.
The son refers to the repair works, the wall that the dad had said collapsed and that he needed money to repair, and the dad is like “hrrgh, don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, son, no problem, but you can’t go out and look because it’s too muddy.
Like I said previous, like anyone who’s ever seen Jarmusch’s flicks before, enjoying this kind of thing is pretty rarified fare, like, super subtle stuff that most people would be irritate by. To be honest I was kinda irritated by it as well, but I still see what he was slyly trying to do.
And it’s still about the relations of kids to their families, to each other, to their parents, and that’s still stuff that resonates deeply with people, given its universality.
The second segment, “Mother”, has Charlotte Rampling, the great Charlotte Rampling, playing an author in Dublin who is not really looking forward to hosting her adult daughters for a visit, which she hashes out with her therapist in a phone session before their arrival.
The daughters are played by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. Anyone with eyes knows who Cate Blanchett is, but fewer people would know Vicky Krieps, except those that have seen Phantom Thread or Corsage, where she so imperiously played Empress Sisi of Austria.
Here, as Lilith, well, she makes a strong impression, but she’s also a breathless, shameless compulsive liar. Blanchett plays Timothea, a very buttoned down prim and proper timid person. Both sisters, clearly not close, clearly compete for their mother’s attention and approval, which is, for whatever reason, not forthcoming. Mother is polite, but has clearly been withholding affection towards her daughters in order to get them to compete, probably for decades, and she, like them, isn’t about to change the patterns of a lifetime.
Watching this section made me ache, I felt this real ache inside towards these characters. The absence of connection, understanding, affection between all three of these people, who live in the same city, but only see each other one day a year, for an hour at best, felt profoundly sad. Watching Timothea, trying to always be the “good” daughter, always reflexively trying to do the proper and “right” thing, even when no-one is watching, for stuff that doesn’t matter (like whether the front gate is closed or not) could bring a chuckle, but it would just as easily make you said seeing how the roles people are placed in within families sometimes cripple us even when we get away from them, even when something terrible, some deeply traumatic events never happened. The presence of something terrible is sometimes usurped by the profound lack of something fundamental.
As for why these dynamics exist, why this mother is like this, we’ll never know, all we see is the sad aftermath. Lilith has a Rolex as well, and this time we’ll guess it actually is a fake, because that’s more in line with what a dishonest person she is.
The third and last section, “Sister, Brother” is somehow the most emotionally satisfying and dramatically meaningful. Two fraternal twins, Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) meet in Paris after the deaths of their parents in a plane crash. They actually care about each other, and can comfort each other in their grief and sadness.
They walk around in the apartment where they must have lived together a long while ago, emptied of all the stuff that made it home, and yet, though it’s not explicitly set out, the parents, though Americans in Gay Paris, were maybe crims or spies or something not on the up and up. And yet this family was close, in this family there was love. All three segments have themes of how unknowable some parents are to their own children, but in this one where the parents had, for some reason, IDs with all sorts of alternate identities, the grieving kids mourn the parents they knew and loved.
This segment is touching in the way the other ones aren’t (perhaps deliberately on the sneaky, kooky filmmaker’s part). It almost cries out to us saying “if you have a loving relationship with your sibling, even if you lose your parents, you will at least have each other to depend on, to support each other, and that’s a wonderful thing”. And yet even then I could be reading more into it there than is actually there. Not having seen either of these actors before, maybe I had less expectations, less baggage than with the other segments, where they’re all known properties.
These two are just two young, sad people in Paris, though their gentle humour with each other and the reminiscences of their lives and parents growing up doesn’t ignore their great loss.
Again a Rolex makes an appearance, except here no-one’s lying about whether it’s real or not, it’s just a treasured family heirloom passed down to the son. It’s strange and interesting that Jarmusch uses it in such a way, as he also uses scenes with skateboarders in each of the segments, representing… Something. Quantum physics, something to do with quantum physics, maybe?
Jarmusch is mercurial, and brilliant, and obtuse, and sometimes downright frustrating. His pacing, and the understatement of the acting that he generally wants from his actors is not for everyone. Even as a legend of independent cinema he clearly struggles to get financing for his movies, and it leads to some strange collaborations and elements in his flicks. I don’t know if he got money from Rolex to have it play such a part in this flick, but the involvement of Saint Laurent is more obvious in the use of some of their clothing, and that fairly strong visual motif with the red. Is it as well threaded throughout the story, does it end up meaning anything meaningful, that red clothing motif?
I have no idea, in terms of product placement it’s not as cheesy as having Tony Stark eat Burger King on camera in one of the Iron Man movies, it’s far more subtle than that, but beyond wanting your actors to look good, I have no idea what it might mean.
I enjoyed this flick, I appreciate what it had to say about people and families and the complexities (or lack thereof) that might exist, but it’s not something you’re going to climb to the top of the nearest roof and start yelling your praise for all and sundry to hear after watching. You might just stroke your chin, finish your kombucha and say “hmm, that was okay.”
7 times if Tom Waits were my dad I would demand that he tell me what the guy was actually building in that song from Mule Variations called “What’s He Building In There?” out of 10
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”We seem to be accidentally colour-coordinated. How embarrassing.” - Father Mother Sister Brother
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