Venice Film Festival 2025, review movie Father Mother Sister Brother

Father Mother Sister Brother, with Cate Blanchett

Family bonds represent the driving force of Father Mother Sister Brother, supported by an exceptional cast that has managed to give authentic depth to each character. The narrative unfolds with dynamism despite settings composed of domestic environments: a car, an apartment, a house with a small lake, a warehouse. Essential spaces that tell the story of those who inhabited them. Families geographically distant yet united by the same elements like water, the same objects like a clock, with the slowed-down image of skateboards making distant places and times appear similar.

Jim Jarmusch's direction divides the narrative into three acts and masterfully portrays the tensions, discomfort, and small lies hidden from family members, from peculiarities to subterfuges to more or less innocent secrets. In each sequence, he manages to define what is deliberately omitted from the dialogues between family members, allowing the viewer to perceive their doubts or unease. A direction skillfully supported by the screenplay—powerful and never banal, effective and substantial, yet also allusive and mimic. The sequence in which the mother, Charlotte Rampling, has tea with her daughters, portrayed with equal authenticity by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps, alternates moments of hilarity with elegant magnetism.

Father Mother Sister Brother poetically encapsulates that intricate sense of family—conflictual yet essential, sought after and avoided. Jim Jarmusch succeeds in creating an authentic film.