anywhere out of the world: Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch and the Art of Emotional Hypothermia

The title, Father Mother Sister Brother, announces an itinerary. A journey, then.

We were hoping for a getaway; instead, we got a regional train ride on a strike day, in the rain, with no heating.

Everything unfolds exactly as promised: it’s long, it’s cold, and you find yourself staring out the window wondering why you ever got on board.

First stop: “Father.”
The United States. Tom Waits as a father who pretends to be more of a disheveled, fragile vagrant than he really is, while in fact being quite manipulative, squeezing a few bills out of his children, Jeff (Adam Driver—very good, as always, and therefore somewhat unnecessarily good here) and Emily (Mayim Bialik).
They know almost nothing about each other, even less about their father, and we, the audience, quickly grasp the concept: no one really talks, everyone is a little sad, and this is going to last.

Second stop: “Mother.”
Off to Dublin, with its lukewarm tea and carefully steeped unspoken tensions.

Charlotte Rampling plays a chic, distant, elegant writer, probably allergic to visible emotions.

Once a year, she welcomes her two daughters for a pastry and an existential malaise: Timothea (Cate Blanchett, brilliant even when playing boredom) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps, broke but cool).

Both pretend they’re doing fine, the mother pretends to care, and the film pretends that this emotional frigidity is moving.
Spoiler: it’s mostly freezing.

Final stop: “Sister Brother.”
Paris, the childhood home, dead parents, very fresh trauma.
Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play twins who are very different, very beautiful, very silent, and very much in mourning. It’s delicate. It’s slow. It’s sad.

We get it. Truly.

Three episodes, three groups of characters, three settings, and to hold it all together: Rolex watches (because time passes, obviously), toasts with non-alcoholic drinks (joy is sober here), skaters appearing like rolling metaphors, and a few moments of gratuitous beauty—literally the only moments when you can breathe.

All of it orchestrated by Jim Jarmusch, who locks his film into a double paradox:
it’s intelligent, it’s controlled… and yet deeply depressing.

First paradox: telling us about the beauty of family bonds through dysfunctional, fractured families, riddled with resentment and frustration.
Second paradox: explaining that words never say everything, while filling the film with silences so heavy they could probably use a gym membership.

The film works by subtraction, yes—sometimes to the point of subtracting the desire to keep watching.

And yet, everything is there.

The Jarmusch style, unmistakable: elegant framing, deliberate slowness, marginal humanity, impeccable music, characters slightly out of sync with the world.

But in its relentless coherence, the film becomes a sealed object—cold, distant, almost clinical. A perfectly executed demonstration of auteur cinema, but emotionally anemic.

Universality, the film’s proudly claimed virtue, becomes its main problem.
Yes, family is universal.
Yes, it’s made of disillusionment, frustration, and unspoken truths.

But did we really need to be reminded of all this with such gravity, in a world already saturated with grayness, silence, and moral fatigue?

We would have liked a sidestep. A spark. A risk. Something. Anything.

Father Mother Sister Brother is not a manual on family life; it’s a summary.

A good summary—well written, well shot, well acted. But a summary nonetheless.

It teaches us nothing we don’t already know, doesn’t shake us, doesn’t surprise us.
It confirms. Calmly. Politely. Too politely.

And that may be the real problem: Father Mother Sister Brother won the Golden Lion, but it lacks that grain of madness, that boldness, that warmth that would make it memorable as anything other than “that very well-made, very intelligent, and very depressing film.”

It is elegant, yes. Lucid, certainly. Poetic, at times. But original? Not really.

Necessary? Even less so.