Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman
I was in Paris when they announced it.
The Golden Lion for Father Mother Sister Brother.
There was this collective, slightly confused shuffling of feet in the press room when the jury read out the name. We all clapped, obviously. You clap for Jim Jarmusch. It’s basically written into the unwritten contract of being a film critic. But the enthusiasm in the room was incredibly thin. We all just sort of looked at each other, knowing exactly what had just happened.
It felt a lot like a couple of years back. Pedro Almodóvar took the same prize for The Room Next Door. You sit there thinking about their massive, towering careers. Almodóvar dropping Pain and Glory in 2019, which genuinely felt like the perfect, heartbreaking final page of a brilliant diary. Jarmusch giving us Paterson in 2016, a film so quiet and brilliant it sort of ruined me for a week.
And then you look at what they actually won the big prize for later on.
It makes you wonder if festival juries just get tired. You put a bunch of exhausted directors and actors in a room for two weeks, force them to watch twenty films, and by the end of it, their brains are totally fried. They look at a list of names, see a master they respect, and just hand them the trophy. It’s easier than fighting over some challenging, messy debut. It’s a lifetime achievement award wearing a fake moustache. For Venice, this is entirely normal behaviour.
Look, Father Mother Sister Brother is out in the UK on the 26th of February. People are going to go see it. They’ll see the poster with the slick styling and the big studio logos and expect something profound.
I just don’t think they’re going to get it.
Let me back up a bit.
Jarmusch is the king of the outsiders. He’s the eternal immigrant in his own country. His films are usually about people who don’t belong anywhere, floating through diners and cabs and cheap hotels. So when I heard the title of this new one, I was actually interested. Father Mother Sister Brother.
Family.
That is incredibly strange territory for him. He doesn’t really do the nuclear family.
Actually, I suppose he touched on it in Stranger Than Paradise. That was what, forty years ago? The Hungarian cousin turning up in New York. But even then, that wasn’t a family drama. That was just a few lost people trying to figure out who they were. The family connection was just a convenient excuse to put them in a tiny room together. It was a film about an identity crisis. A running theme in his work. He usually talks around a subject, using visuals and silence, rather than facing it head-on.
But this new one tries to tackle the family dynamic directly.
The film is a triptych. Three separate stories, very similar setups, different locations. Classic Jarmusch structure. You immediately think of Night on Earth or Coffee and Cigarettes.
The first segment is called “Father”.
You’ve got Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik playing brother and sister. They go to visit their dad, played by Tom Waits. Waits is playing a grifter, obviously. If you cast Tom Waits in a film in the year 2025, you are basically asking him to show up, growl a bit, and look like he just slept under a bridge. He’s great at it. Nobody does it better. But we’ve seen it.
They only see him once a year. The whole thing is incredibly stilted. They sit down. They drink tea. The conversation goes absolutely nowhere.
It is painful to watch, and not in a good way. The dialogue is so blunt. At the end, there’s a terribly forced hug.
And that’s it.
I sat there waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the subtext to show up. But it didn’t. Jarmusch just shoves the awkwardness right in your face from the first frame. These people don’t know each other. They don’t like each other. The problem is clear from the very first second. From a director who usually builds entire worlds out of unspoken details, it felt strangely amateurish. The only thing that gets you through the segment is a couple of decent jokes scattered around. But mostly, it’s just exhausting.
Then we move to the second story. “Mother”.
Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. They play sisters visiting their intensely conservative mother, Charlotte Rampling. Blanchett doing her tight-lipped neurotic routine. Rampling being terrifyingly cold.
Again, they only visit once a year. Again, they sit and drink tea.
It’s a literal copy of the first segment. The exact same beats.
Jarmusch loves doing this. He loves making you watch variations on a theme. So you get these repeating motifs. They literally sit there debating the merits of different types of mineral water while checking their identical Rolex watches. At one point, they watch some teenage skateboarders grinding down a rail in slow motion.
Why slow motion? Is he saying the youth are passing by while the old sit in dusty rooms? It feels tired.
At first, I thought this was just another lazy repetition. Just an excuse to shoot beautiful actors looking bored.
But then I looked closer at how he was structuring the whole thing.
After the “Mother” segment finished, I actually started doubting my initial reaction. I thought, maybe the old man has fooled us all.
Maybe the total lack of connection is the entire point. Because there is no real family here. It’s completely absent. Everyone is wearing the title of “Mother” or “Sister” like an incredibly itchy, ill-fitting coat. They hate the roles they are supposed to play. It makes you wonder if that’s his commentary on the modern world. A bleak look at how relationships are basically just forced obligations now. We show up, we perform the role of the good daughter, we check our matching expensive watches, and we leave as fast as we can.
It’s a cynical thought. But it works as a theory.
Then the third segment starts and ruins my theory completely.
“Sister Brother”.
Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore. They play siblings. They are visiting the apartment of their recently deceased parents.
Imagine clearing out your parents’ house. It’s normally a deeply messy, chaotic experience. You find old letters, you argue about who gets the ugly lamp, you sit on the floor.
But here? Nothing. The place is totally empty. Stripped to the bare walls. Everything has been shoved into a storage unit somewhere.
They find a plastic bag lying around. Inside are some photos and a bunch of fake ID cards belonging to their parents. Suddenly, they realise they knew absolutely nothing about the people who raised them.
This is probably the best part of the whole film. It feels a bit like a callback to the twins segment in Coffee and Cigarettes. You know the one, where they argue about who is stealing whose style. Except Sabbat and Moore don’t argue. They don’t do much of anything. They are incredibly flat.
But here, in this empty room, you finally get a glimpse of what Jarmusch is trying to say. He seems to think that family isn’t blood. It’s just the stuff you keep. A photo album. A memory of a house. The junk you shove in a storage facility. If you’re lucky, maybe it’s the person standing next to you looking at the same empty walls.
He’s said stuff like this in interviews for decades. Home is a poem, or a dog, or a pigeon coop. It’s something you construct yourself from scraps.
It’s a nice sentiment.
The problem is the delivery.
The whole thing is wrapped in this incredibly thick, glossy layer of high fashion. Yves Saint Laurent funded this film, alongside Mubi. And you can tell.
The clothes are ridiculous. They are actively distracting.
I remember a decade ago, sitting in a stuffy screening room in Cannes, indie films felt desperate and alive. You scraped together money from a dozen European arts councils and made something scrappy. Now, luxury brands are stepping in to play Medici. It sounds great on paper. The directors get their budgets, the brands get their cultural prestige.
But what does that actually mean on the ground?
It means you get actors in perfectly tailored, exquisite garments trying to play deeply flawed, disconnected people. The clothes don’t let them breathe. They can’t slump in a chair properly. They look like they’re in a magazine editorial about sadness, rather than actually experiencing it.
It’s like those posh shortbread biscuits you get at Christmas in the ridiculously elaborate metal tins. You open the heavy, embossed lid expecting an absolute revelation, and it’s just dry, crumbling biscuit dust. It looks amazing sitting on the shelf. But it tastes like nothing.
The cinematography suffers from the exact same problem. We get these slow, melancholic outdoor shots that look exactly like something from a Hong Sang-soo film. But they don’t carry any weight here. They’re just pretty filler between the awkward tea drinking. Even the classic Jarmusch trademarks feel drained of energy.
People love him for his self-references. Fans defend it constantly. But watching those slow-motion skateboarders roll past again, it didn’t feel clever or poetic. It felt like they wandered in from a 1990s music video because he simply couldn’t think of a better way to fill the silence in the room.
When a script is this thin, directors usually try to fix it by throwing famous faces at the camera. It’s a cinematic rescue squad.
You end up sitting there in the dark playing a game with yourself, trying to figure out which genius actor is doing the best job of hiding how bored they are.
Vicky Krieps wins, by the way.
Not because she has bright pink hair in the film, though she does. She just manages to find some sort of actual pulse in her scenes. She has this weird, nervous energy that makes you believe she’s genuinely trapped in a room with an overbearing mother. Everyone else feels like they are reading carefully typed lines off a piece of high-grade cardstock, but Krieps actually acts. She brings a bit of dirt into a room that has been scrubbed clean by the wardrobe department.
So, we have a film funded by a massive fashion house and a trendy streaming platform, starring half of Hollywood’s most interesting faces, directed by an absolute legend of American cinema.
And it just sits there. Completely dead on the screen.
It feels like a massive, heavily hyped vinyl box set. The kind they release for an anniversary, with a velvet slipcase and heavy-weight records. You buy it, you put it on the coffee table so people can see you own it, and you never, ever actually play the records.
It’s great that Jarmusch is still getting his films financed. Honestly, it is. The industry is an absolute mess right now and I’d much rather have him working and making things than not.
But there’s a moment in the very first story that perfectly sums up my problem with this entire project.
Adam Driver’s character knows his dad is in a bad way. He wants to help him. But he has absolutely no idea how to connect on a basic human level. He can’t talk to him.
So, he just hands him an envelope of cash and a luxury food hamper full of expensive spaghetti and imported marinara sauce.
That’s exactly what this film feels like.
Jarmusch knows something is broken in how we talk to each other. He knows we’re all drifting apart and forgetting how to be families. But he doesn’t seem to know how to dig into the messy, ugly reality of it anymore.
So instead of giving us a film with blood and dirt and real conversation, he gives us a beautifully arranged basket of very expensive spaghetti.
It looks lovely. But we’re still starving.
