Father Mother Sister Brother Review: Life Is Short

In Father Mother Sister Brother, Jim Jarmusch looks at family relationships and urges us to break down the walls we’ve put up and start talking to each other before it’s too late.

In “Father,” brother and sister Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their father (Tom Waits) in a remote location in the Northeast US, some time after their mother’s death. Though their motives are up to interpretation, they clearly haven’t seen him in a while, and they don’t intend to stay at his house longer than they need to, not unlike the second story’s protagonists.

In the Dublin-set “Mother,” a mother and her two daughters only see each other once a year. But when Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) show up at their mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) door for their yearly afternoon tea, they don’t even hug. Instead, they spend their time either showcasing expensive items they may or may not own or making small talk about meaningless subjects that they mostly lie about.

While, at first, these two tales would seem to have little in common, we soon start to notice certain recurring elements that link them together, from specific objects, events and even phrases that show up in both stories to similarities in their clothes, an interest in money, and a tendency to lie. The same can be said for the third story, “Sister Brother,” where two siblings visit their parents’ apartment in Paris after their untimely death in a plane crash.

What makes the third tale different from the other two is that brother and sister Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) have a warm, loving relationship with each other, despite–or, perhaps, as a result of–their loss. But Billy and Skye’s parents are dead, so they still can’t communicate with them, even if they wanted to. Which is precisely the point of Jarmusch’s film.

With his usual quiet, observational style of storytelling and irresistible irony, the writer-director gives us a movie that comes alive in its silences and glances, and in the things that aren’t said but only hinted at. We don’t even know why these relationships are strained, but that’s not the point of the movie. What matters is that Jeff, Emily, Timothea, Lilith and their respective living relatives aren’t keeping secrets from each other out of spite, but out of shame, guilt, fear of judgement, and even love. All of these characters have put up some very high walls between themselves and their families that aren’t letting any emotion come through, but by the time the walls will have come down and they’ll have let themselves feel, it might be too late.

Father Mother Sister Brother is more surface-level than most of Jarmusch’s previous work, and the second story is a little too long–perhaps intentionally so. But it’s also a film that sneaks up on you with the humanity of its subjects, the subtle yet effective humor that permeates most scenes, and the familiarity of its characters’ imperfect familiar relationships. It’s a cynical, pessimistic film, but not a hopeless one. With three interconnected stories, Jarmusch reminds us that what matters is the here and now, and urges us to start communicating and let our families in.

Father Mother Sister Brother had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2025. The film will be screened at the New York Film Festival October 3, 2025