And so, for the second year running, I must ask: how in the hell did *this* win the Golden Lion in Venice? After the 2024 edition’s top honours went to Pedro Almodovar for one of his worst efforts in the form of The Room Next Door, now 2025 has also handed the trophy over to a deeply unremarkable piece of work from an esteemed ‘overdue’ auteur with Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. An anthology of three familial tales, it has its fun and sweet moments, but its strengths leave far less of an impression than its deeply irritating weaknesses.
Split into ‘Father’, ‘Mother’, and ‘Sister Brother’, the triptych puts its best foot forward in the first tale of an ageing dad (played by Tom Waits) who might be faking, or at least exaggerating, his elderly fragilities in order to bilk money from his successful adult kids (played by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik). Waits is fun and funny, though Driver is pretty muted, and it’s also by far the most propulsive segment, as concerned to not overstay its welcome as Waits’s grown-up kids are. If only the same could be said for ‘Mother’, the difficult middle child of the family here.
Set in Ireland but in a family of Brits, here Charlotte Rampling is a posh mother to two posh daughters, the anxious Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and free spirit/pathological liar Lilith (Vicky Krieps, whose very not British accent is explained away by ‘some time in Brussels). This trio have an awkward annual tradition of tea and cakes, and it’s utterly excruciating, but not for the right reasons. Not a single joke here – and there are plenty of horrid attempts – lands, you never once believe in them as a family unit, the whole thing feeling like a miserable student play, giggling ‘ooh, aren’t these silly Brits funny?’. No. They are not.
‘Sister Brother’ closes things out in Paris with a pair of Black American twins (played by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) making their final visit to the old flat of their parents who recently died when they crashed their small plane over the Azores (let’s get a film about *them*, please). Flitting between French and English and steeped in the semi-magical ‘twin factor’ that keeps them totally truthful with one another, they are the most Jarmuschian protagonists of the bunch, and Paris is the only place where we get any sort of visual fizz, so it’s a decent segment, but not at all strong enough to make up for ‘Mother’.
Repeated visuals and rhyming dialogue between sections gives a bit of poetry to the whole thing, while the thread of familial honesty (a mix of truth and lies in ‘Father’, total dishonesty in ‘Mother’, and vulnerable, unvarnished truth in ‘Sister Brother’) gives an interesting thematic throughline, but this is a feeble offering. I couldn’t say that the first and last segments are actually, properly bad, but in their gentle pleasantries they have little impact, so the only strong, lasting emotion I got out of this was aggravation.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 