For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed and produced delicate, character-driven films. FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate — almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. As always, Jarmusch brings his worlds to life with the essential assistance of his collaborators, including two masterful cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, and the brilliant editor Affonso Gonçalves. The film was awarded the Golden Lion (Best Film) at 2025’s Venice Film Festival. (Synopsis from the 2025 New York Film Festival)
“Jim Jarmusch has been doing his idiosyncratic thing for so long we sometimes take him for granted. But then he comes along with a film as delicate and lovely, as singular and perfectly realized as FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER and quietly floors you…. It’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.” —David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter “In appearing to give you nothing, Jim Jarmusch‘s almost perversely downplayed trio of short stories FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER winds up giving you almost everything if you can tap into its cool vibrations. Jarmusch has called [it] an ‘anti-action film,’ but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.” —Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire “Slivers of concurrence create just enough connective tissue between the three parts…to make them work chorally. But they also create the enjoyable, reverse-telescopic impression that we’re looking at lives that are massively different in the broad aspects of nationality, social class, values and upbringing, yet curiously in sync in the tiniest, chiming details.” —Jessica Kiang, Variety
