Jim Jarmusch’s Family Reunions

Set in three countries across three parts, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (2025) is geographically expansive but dramatically concentrated. The plot of each section—from “Father” to “Mother” to “Sister Brother”—is minimal, recording families’ efforts to become reacquainted over coffee or tea. Thanks to generational gaps and prolonged periods of absence, attempts at reconnection between parents and their grown children are often faltering, and not always successful. The effect is both tragic and comic—at least until the third section, when the restless editing between isolated characters gives way to longer, relaxed takes and meditative pans, opening up to heartfelt rather than dutiful forms of affection. 

Various actors from previous Jarmusch films appear in Father Mother Sister Brother. Father, for instance, is played by Tom Waits, who has worked with Jarmusch on five other features. Here, his elusive and eccentric character lives in a house beside a placid lake in rural New Jersey, where he deliberately disarranges his living room ahead of an afternoon visit from his daughter, Emily (Mayim Bialik), and his son, Jeff (Adam Driver). While Emily and Jeff are economically comfortable, Father seems periodically in need of handouts, signalling neediness through the stage-managed clutter of his home. Jeff has been helping with his expenses, despite Emily’s disapproval. The passage is bookended with Jeff and Emily arriving and leaving by car—a motif that recurs in “Mother” and “Sister Brother.” While Jeff and Emily pass snowy country landscapes, the drives that follow move through sunnier European cities. It’s characteristic of Jarmusch’s leisurely sense of drift that he focuses almost as much on these drives as on the visits themselves.

Money is also a semi-repressed subtext in the following episode, which is similarly freighted with subtle behavioral nuances. Mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a successful romance novelist, living in an affluent area of Dublin. Her house is plushly ordered, as if it were a formal showpiece, and is anything but cluttered. Her two daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) are coming over for afternoon tea. It’s an annual event, suggested by her therapist and designed, Mother says, to “keep them from stirring things up.” That suggestive remark remains mysterious, is never explained—although we learn that both daughters originally moved to Dublin in order to be closer to Mother and, beyond this yearly affair, now only occasionally catch up with her over the phone.

This time it’s the parent rather than the children who wields the upper hand. Mother sets a prim tone—one which Timothea, the elder sister, dutifully follows and Lilith, a compulsive liar who resorts to elaborate subterfuge to pretend she isn’t a bohemian in financial straits, unravels with small acts of rebellion, such as checking her cellphone at the table and sprinkling her words with profanity.

When the matriarch asks “Shall I be mother?” before pouring the tea, Lilith’s answer is sarcastic: “You might as well start sometime.” When Timothea observes that the three of them seem to be accidentally color-coordinated, Mother replies, “How embarrassing.” As in “Father,” characters step on each other’s toes as they desperately keep things moving in a way that is disquieting; everyone is navigating a void, trying not to stumble into it. Is Mother happier coordinating her own taste than coordinating her daughters? Probably, but color coordination between family members in fact runs all through the film. In “Father,” the three characters each wear something brownish-maroon. In “Mother,” the three wear something bright red—and even the purple, green, and blue letters of the film’s title credits are replicated in the flowers and table settings here.

Both the filmmaking style and the characters’ behavior in “Sister Brother” counter the deceptions and tensions of “Father” and “Mother.” (For that matter, the overall subtlety of Father Mother Sister Brother seems to disavow the relative bombast of Jarmusch’s previous feature, The Dead Don’t Die [2019].) Skye and Billy, played respectively (and very attractively) by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat, are fraternal twins who meet in Paris to visit the former apartment of their parents, who recently died in a plane crash. We never see these parents except in photographs. Yet they hover over proceedings, inspiring the siblings and their nostalgic interactions. Long takes and liquid pans shape the episode, including a powerful moment in which the camera surveys the quiet flat in a tender, 360-degree encirclement of its empty rooms.

2.

In 2000, I weighed two of Jarmusch’s earlier, more touristic features—Mystery Train (1989) and Night on Earth (1991)—against his subsequent masterpieces Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). I was taken aback when a reviewer recently cited this critique in order to downgrade Father Mother Sister Brother, inferring that I think all of Jarmusch’s anthology films are relatively trivial. But I beg to differ, regarding Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) as one of Jarmusch’s key efforts, above all because of the intricate care taken in ordering and structuring each episode. (By the same token, I would rank James Joyce’s beautifully calibrated story collection Dubliners higher than his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) Like Jarmusch’s latest work, Coffee and Cigarettes plays with similarities and differences, and also features fraternal twins and rhyming overhead shots of table settings. Like Father Mother Sister Brother, it’s anything but trivial.

Jarmusch is frequently underappreciated for his gifts as a formalist, and like many others of his type, he regards form as a verb as well as a noun—that is to say, he sees forming as a kind of prospecting, a way of unearthing new patterns of his own. In Father Mother Sister Brother, these patterns include flashes of scratchy color and light. Appearing before, after, and between the three sections, these hypnagogic interludes function like sounding boards through which aspects of what we have heard and seen might be reconfigured into fragments of waking dreams. Those motifs might be arcane expressions like “Bob’s your uncle” and “Nowheresville,” or recurrent discussions about the qualities of wristwatches and drinking water. They might be various toasts—with water, tea, and coffee—or skateboarders, shown morphing lyrically in and out of slow-motion as they glide past the various siblings, as if to remind them of their lost youth.

Jarmusch has studied poetry and plays music (it’s his own minimalist music that soundtracks this film). While the triangular gatherings of Father Mother Sister Brother recall the three-part, three-character schemes of Stranger than Paradise (1984) and Down by Law (1986), we might also consider the origins of Jarmusch’s poetics in New York School minimalism—most gracefully spelled out in Paterson (2016), in which every character is depicted as an artist of some sort. Given these influences, the three episodes of Father Mother Sister Brother might begin to resemble successive stanzas, with thematic repetitions and audiovisual rhymes. In both poetry and music, blank spaces and rests can become as expressive as words or notes, allowing the latter to reverberate, and Jarmusch’s art of filmmaking, in turn, depends on vibrating these pauses and empty spaces. In much the same way, part of what we know about his characters is always what we don’t know. It isn’t surprising that Yasujirô Ozu—whose tombstone bears the single word “mu,” meaning “nothing”—is one of Jarmusch’s cinematic models. 

     

Jarmusch insists in interviews that he doesn’t judge any of his characters, and clearly has some empathy for the family members in “Father” and “Mother.” But he plainly loves the twins in “Sister Brother.” Comparing similarities and differences with the previous episodes, it becomes hard to overlook the more positive vibes shared between the twins, being genuinely intimate with each other in their not-quite-matching black leather jackets. If the episodes are interpreted together as voices in a lively three-way conversation about how family members might relate to one another, this positive representation of mixed-race siblings stands in provocative contrast to the more moribund representation of the two white families.

When, in the Paris apartment, Skye and Billy enter their deceased parents’ former bedroom and hug one another, the loving twins implicitly become their father and mother. (Jarmusch seems to regard both pairs as comrades-in-arms, suggesting that Father Mother Sister Brother derives from political as well as poetic impulses.) In this scene, sister and brother exude a warmth that we’re invited to share, as well as ponder. 

I have always thought of Jarmusch as a citizen not of any one place but of the world; it strikes me that it is this worldliness that makes him sophisticated as an artist. Tom Waits, who knows Jarmusch better than I do, once said, “The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was fifteen … As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He’s been an immigrant—a benign, fascinated foreigner—ever since. And all his films are about that.” Jarmusch’s “immigrant” sensibilities might account for the unexpected transnational mixes across his cinema, whether it’s a Native American who worships William Blake’s poetry (Gary Farmer’s character in Dead Man), a Black American samurai (Forest Whittaker’s character in Ghost Dog), or an African assassin styled to look like James Bond (Isaach de Bankolé in The Limits of Control [2009]). With its American twins who grew up in Paris with a Black father and a white mother, Father Mother Sister Brother seems to continue that inclusive lineage, suggesting a wider cultural grounding that is also proposed by Jarmusch’s geographical expansiveness. Paradoxically, this becomes a minimalism that seems to embrace the whole world.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a Chicago-based film critic who maintains a website archiving his work at jonathanrosenbaum.net. He is the author or coauthor of eighteen books, including Camera Movements That Confound Us (2025), Travels in the Cities of Cinema (2025), and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (2024).