Father Mother Sister Brother: Three Cities, Three Families

Some films make you feel like an observer no one has noticed. So much so that you cannot take your eyes off the screen for fear of missing the slightest facial expression, a hand gesture, the way an object is placed. Someone says something, the other does not respond, and that silence tells you more than any dialogue could. Or a mother asks “shall I be mother?” as she reaches for the teapot, and her daughter replies “you might as well start sometime”, and years of distance are summed up in a single line. A sequence shot from above the table shows two of them taking their tea with milk while the other drinks it plain; from that alone we understand the dynamics between them. Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Father Mother Sister Brother is exactly that kind of experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA07EmbZ0b0

Jarmusch is one of the most original voices in independent cinema. Since entering the film world with Stranger Than Paradise in 1984, he has been searching for the same thing in all his films: the story within ordinary moments. With Night on Earth he created one of cinema’s cult classics through five taxi rides in five different cities. He found beauty in a journey in Dead Man, in the daily life of a bus driver in Paterson, in the endless boredom of two vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive. In Father Mother Sister Brother he turns his gaze to family relationships more closely than ever before. The film is an anthology of three chapters: three different families in three different countries. Structurally it recalls Night on Earth, but with an important difference. There we watched brief encounters between strangers; here we watch people who have known each other for years but perhaps never truly known each other at all.

The first chapter is set in New Jersey. Tom Waits plays a father who has cut himself off from the world, living alone in a rural area. His grown children Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) have come for one of their rare visits. Their mother has passed away, the father lies to his children about money, and Jeff secretly supports him. In Emily’s eyes you can see the hesitation of someone who has never been able to trust her parent. Waits’s performance is both funny and unsettling; with almost everything he says, you sense he is hiding something behind it.

In the second chapter the camera moves to Dublin. Charlotte Rampling plays a popular novelist and mother whose daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) come to see her once or twice a year. Every visit is staged like a formal tea ceremony. What we see is a deeply distant and measured mother. She speaks more openly with her therapist than she does with her own children, and this detachment is reflected even in the way she sits. The sisters have developed different strategies to win their mother’s approval: Timothea by being agreeable, Lilith by showing off her achievements. But the mother responds to both with the same coldness and distance.

The third chapter is set in Paris and goes somewhere different from the other two. Twin siblings Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) come together to sort through the belongings of their recently deceased parents. The warmest chapter of the film: two siblings who genuinely love each other, share a healthy relationship and were most likely raised with love by healthy parents, leaning on each other to ease their grief.

The real power of the film lies not in what it shows but in what it does not. In each chapter you never directly see the family’s past, the breaking points, the distance that years have built up. But the limited frames you watch tell you a great deal about these families’ relationships, and the moments you do not see on screen complete themselves in your mind. A glance, a silence, a question left unanswered; Jarmusch tells years of history through these small details. Visually the film is crafted with great care. The cinematography makes each scene beautiful in its own way: the cold winter landscape of New Jersey, the dim ambiance of Dublin, the warm interiors of Paris. The camera often leaves characters alone within the frame; a deliberate choice that visualises the loneliness within the family. Overhead shots of tables, scenes inside cars, long silences; the signature elements of Jarmusch’s cinema are all here and work beautifully.

With names like Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling and Vicky Krieps, this may be the strongest ensemble in Jarmusch’s filmography. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, the film marks the biggest award of Jarmusch’s career. Available on MUBI since February 2026.