Director: Jim Jarmusch

Stars: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blachett, Vickey Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore, Luke Sabbat

Jarmusch’s latest is an elegantly structured family triptych. The first segment, ‘Father’, has Driver and Bialik’s siblings Jeff and Emily driving to a wintry U.S. rural town to see their father. Emily is spiky and suspicious, the divorced Jeff (Driver) is meeker and more conciliatory.  When they arrive, they find their father (a wonderfully shifty Tom Waits) in an evasive mood, and as they question him about his welfare, there are indications that things are not as they seem. In similarly structured second part, ‘Mother’, buttoned-up Timothea (Blanchett) and her more free-spirited sister Lilith (Krieps) are visiting their mother (Rampling), a prim fastidious English novelist in suburban Ireland. Over tea and cakes, the sisters talk about their respective lives, hinting at the true nature of their relationship to ‘Mummy’. The final episode, ‘Sister Brother’, has twins Skye (Moore from ‘Pose’) and Billy (Sabat) returning to their old apartment home in Paris following the death of their parents and bonding over mementos, memories and mysteries. The last sequence with its languid pacing and lack of incident feels redolent of Jarmusch’s very early work and initially seems an oddly muted choice to round off the trilogy of stories, but Moore and Sabbat exhibit a touchingly real sibling bond and the elegiac air feels fitting and underlines the film’s themes. Throughout, Jarmusch scatters recurring motifs and expressions, suggesting the universality of the differing family units, while demonstrating the ultimate unknowability of our parents’ lives. The director draws fine performances from his ensemble, and the respective family homes are lovingly rendered by cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux.

David Willoughby

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