The Brooklyn Rail

Much ink has been spilt describing Jim Jarmusch’s mastery over the anthology film—from Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) to Night on Earth (1991) he definitely has a firm hand on the form—but he’s now added a new one to his roster in 2025. Father Mother Sister Brother premiered at the Venice Film Festival, but screened stateside at the New York Film Festival just a few weeks later. Staged in three parts, using two different cinematographers, the impressive cast comes together to depict three distinct families, unrelated in plot, theme, or character but loosely strung together with a series of motifs and witticisms. Taken together, the three form an entertaining and more complete whole than one lengthy tell-all, talking about a very particular stage of familyhood—aging parents and their adult children, and the awkwardness and sadness nestled in those wrinkles.  

The looseness with which each family story is held together works just like Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia’s collection of “long-short stories” called Sevastopol (New Directions, 2021). The title and structure calls back even further though to Leo Tolstoy’s same experiment with the story triptych. Each of these creators sees how tenuous connections, when packaged together, can tell a more complete story when seen and felt at once. It worked in 1855, and it’s still working in our moment of fragmented attention. Thanks to myriad inputs from social media spoon-feeding us short-form videos to the increasingly unpredictable and unreliable news cycle, this short story-like format feels fresh and relevant. With legible chapters, not unlike reading a good book and closing it for sleep at the end of one chapter, it’s a compelling argument for filmic storytelling right now. But it’s worth looking closer at Fraia and Tolstoy as not only predecessors, but new ways into this film.

Fraia evokes the Sevastopol of Tolstoy’s antiheroic Crimean War correspondence: Sevastopol Sketches, originally published as a series of three in 1855. (Tolstoy’s war correspondence remains relevant politically today as we continue to witness Russia attempt to annex Ukraine, and it is worth remembering that Tolstoy himself has been all but blacklisted in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for this anti-imperialist writing.) Fraia’s work has been translated into English by Zoë Perry, so I was able to enjoy each story, titled with a different month: December, May, and August (echoing Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol in December,” “May,” and “August”). And like Tolstoy, these chapter titles do not allude to chronology. They are rather a moody container for mercurial, specific snapshots of human interaction. This is what makes the short story, and the anthology film alike, so intriguing and so utterly human. While Tolstoy’s Sketches share connective tissue via the subject matter of war, they remain separate and distinct, showcasing a different host of characters and different stages of battle. His characters vacillate between feelings of cowardice and energy, fearing how they will perform in battle and concerned if they were perceived as weak in the face of the enemy. As for Fraia, his three stories reminisce on ill-fated projects: a young, privileged girl’s obsession with summiting Everest; a remote hospitality venture in the jungle; a doomed playwriting collaboration between a young student and a career drunk. Somehow while reading these as a set of three, a fuller, more complete story emerges. These writers are using all the “lenses” available to a writer working with text and paper. And combining mediums is really what Jarmusch seems to be doing, back then and today.

Maybe Jarmusch’s characters in Father Mother Sister Brother aren’t tying tourniquets or scaling the Himalayas, but they’re performing a very specific and timeless story for us. Hyper-focused on dialogue with minimal camera movement, each of Jarmusch’s three stories unfold essentially in one room, and watching the film is almost like being tasked with close reading. First comes “Father,” where we follow Jeff (Adam Driver) with his sister Emmy (Mayim Bialik) through snowy country roads to visit their father (Tom Waits). Jeff and Emmy are tightly wound in every way, from wardrobe to efficiency of words and an ability to stomach silence. Their father is a mystery, to them and to us: a bit of a recluse, the source of his poverty is unclear. Yet over carefully choreographed overhead shots of tea and water cups we piece together a story that beneath the ratty blanket there is indeed a designer couch, and the rusted truck in the driveway is merely sculptural.

The tenuous web holding the film together is no doubt influenced by the choice to hire two cinematographers: Frederick Elmes shot “Father” and Yorick Le Saux the final two chapters. “Mother” introduces two adult daughters, Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) on their way to visit their clearly successful yet distant mother (Charlotte Rampling). The occasion is tea, and we are at the table of three English women now living in Dublin. The conversation jockeys from both sisters eager to impress (if not connect) with their mother. Lilith, the wilder one, conceals her queerness and brokenness beneath lies about her Lexus being in the shop. Tim attempts to share real news of a promotion and obvious upward momentum, but is drowned out by the noise.

The final chapter combines “Sister Brother” into one tale of a pair of fraternal twins (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) visiting their recently-deceased parents’ apartment in Paris. They have crashed a small plane into the ocean near the Azores. Bohemians, all of them, these twins wear custom and complementary Saint Laurent leather looks while sitting on the floor of the empty flat, looking through old photographs and ephemera. While the parents are literally absent in this story, we learn more about them through their children’s performance than about the children themselves.

The dynamic and distinct experience of becoming an “adult child” is Jarmusch’s Crimean War. Father Mother Sister Brother’s connective tissue is felt by more than just the motifs and dialogue that unfold. Quips like “Bob’s your uncle” (???), hot beverages, and cleverly matching wardrobes braid all three stories together. The costuming is by Saint Laurent, the house also behind the looks in Sorrentino’s 2024 film Parthenope. Under the Saint Laurent Productions label, they seem to be revamping their interest in film wardrobes—Yves himself designed costumes for classics like Belle de Jour (1967). If anything the characters are a little too well dressed, adding a bit of an uncanny aspect to the film yet one that you notice. A pop of red, a subtle matching scheme among family members who exist in different worlds—these details tie the cinematographers together, and remind us of the calling cards.

Though on the surface, each family in Jarmusch’s film is evocatively un-ordinary, as the scene unfolds we realize that these family secrets probably aren’t all that different from our own. Yes, we aren’t at war in the eighteenth century, but we understand the pain of loss. No, our parents didn’t die in a small craft plane crash over the Azores, but we know the pain of loss. While Jarmusch’s wit is here to entertain us, there is something for everyone to relate to in his tellings. Whether its concerns for an aging parent, anxiety about money, secrets, formality, or—the final straw—death, there is a little something for everyone in Father Mother Sister Brother. And its critics might always be excusably correct in saying the Jarmusch didn’t fully realize, completely sell, or utterly sway an audience with this film. That’s why Tolstoy went on to write War and Peace after his Sketches. We don’t make art to see ourselves reflected in it, like a mirror. But what keeps us coming back is how vividly we can see ourselves in the climber struggling for oxygen at the summit, or the new orphan flipping through receipts on a Parisian floor. The answer to such criticisms can only be defended by reminding oneself that the short form is necessarily incomplete, and at its best, enigmatic.