NYFF Review: Family Sure is a Funny Thing in Jim Jarmusch's 'Father Mother Sister Brother'

One never expects to reference a Saturday Night Live skit when reviewing a film by indie iconoclast filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. And yet the Night on Earth and Only Lovers Left Alive writer-director’s latest, titled Father Mother Sister Brother, owes as much to those 90s SNL skits about a dysfunctional family having dinner that always ended with Will Ferrell bellowing “I drive a Dodge Stratus!” as it does to any arty esoteric tricks Jarmusch might pull from his distressed Saint Laurent sleeves.

And it’s all the better for it. Easily his best film since Broken Flowers, this is a sly and sweet rumination on the unfamiliarity of family—the awkwardness of the relationships we had no choice in choosing, and the singular strange brew that results from the forced mixture of all our off-kilter ingredients. No you can’t choose your family, but you can and should choose to watch this movie and make yourself feel a little less insane about it.

Trifurcated into a trio of unrelated chapters (each with enough star-power to fuel films on their own had he so chosen) Father Mother Sister Brother begins unsurprisingly with “Father.” Here we meet Adam Driver as Jeff and (turns out Jarmusch is a big-time Jeopardy-head) Mayim Bialik as Emily, Banana Republic catalogue’d out siblings seated in the front of a Hybrid and driving through some unremarkable snowy New Jersey sticks to reach their dad’s far-out cabin situated beside an icy lake.

Neither has seen Father (Tom Waits) in a few years; reference is made to him causing a big scene at the funeral of their mother, and Emily definitely hasn’t seen him since that. It becomes clear that Jeff’s retained some connection via the telephone—he’s helped their dad out financially with repairs and construction as need be. And he’s brought along a great big basket of fancy food, which Emily seems mildly surprised / perturbed by. Mostly the brother and sister seem genial, friendly, even somewhat comfortable. But there’s not a whole lot of warmth between the two. (But then this section feels very Northeastern, and speaking as one of those people that’s exactly how it should feel.)

There’s even less warmth when they arrive at dad’s place, as you can feel the both of them straining subconsciously for their coats from the minute they take their coats off. And for his part, with his hair tousled and his clothes more so, Dad seems as if he’s just woken up from a season-long nap and is ready to get back to that as quickly as possible. But the three do make a valiant effort, smoothing the long silences over with stilted conversations that walk the line between stiff and fraught with deeply-unspoken history. Yes the kids are fine; no I don’t need money. Yes we’re all wearing the same shade of burgundy even while we couldn’t look less like one another if we were beamed in from other planets.

All three chapters of Father Mother Sister Brother echo one another in unexpected fashions, and this last bit is chief among of them—Jarmusch finds ways to connect his characters even as they blunder about down their long worn grooves of disaffection. And so in the middle “Mother” portion, as we head to Dublin and meet punky ne’er-do-well Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and her uptight sister Timothea (Cate Blanchett) as they converge on their annual tea and cake luncheon with Mother (Charlotte Rampling), we then watch them work out they’re, in their clashing ways, all wearing the same shade of red too. “Clashing” being the exact right word for it—in that it’s basically the same but man oh man do they not go together.

Still for all the furtive mumbling and bumbling about, it’s the ways they do know each other underneath the people they’ve become that makes each of these reunions so fascinating. You can see Krieps in particular reverting to teenage solipsism as the afternoon wears on, her thin patina of maturity dissolving under the eyes of those who knew her in uncomfortable adolescence. These are adults straining to maintain the selves they’ve become under the brutal gaze of those who know them before, and that goes very much for the parents too—Jarmusch is fascinated by the people Mother and Father each have constructed for the benefit of their kids, and the places where those wholly invented characters vehemently mismatch.

The third chapter of “Brother Sister” consists of by far the healthiest bond on display in Jarmusch’s triptych, as sister Skye (Indya Moore) and brother Billy (Luka Sabbat) are twins heading back to their recently deceased parents flat in Paris one last time to say goodbye to their childhood home, along with the atypical expatriate life they lived therein. Genuine warmth reverberates between these two, but the mystery of who their parents really were—a mystery they will never have the answers to now that they’re gone—fascinates and confuses them as they sort through photos and boxes, and stare down empty corridors that echo with a shared history. Seeing everything stuffed into a storage container feels like a period put onto all of those question marks.

Father Mother Sister Brother is endlessly fascinated by and turning over these borders between intimacy and distance; the bizarre bonds fractured and welded back into place between family members across time. Strangers in discernment and constitution, if not genetics. And they’re inescapable, these connections, no matter how far we run or how many times we dye our hair—we will always be our parents’ children, is the cold hard fact of it. And for those of us who understand the ungainliness of these truths too well, Jarmusch’s aversion to sentimentality is most welcome. Funny, yes; distressing, yes also. Such is the stuff of life, and this, one of Jarmusch’s best and wisest films, is awash with it.

Father Mother Sister Brother justs creened at the New York Film Festival. It releases in theaters on the exact right date of December 24th, 2025.