by Elisa Giudici
Tom Wait in Jim Jarmusch's FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
On the closing night of Venice 82, the Golden Lion went to Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. The decision immediately set off a storm of controversy. The overwhelming favorite had been Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, Tunisia's Oscar submission, and a film that electrified audiences with its urgency and moral weight. Yet once again, the jury—this year led by Alexander Payne—opted for a different kind of statement: not the raw political immediacy of Gaza, but the quieter, “career-crowning” recognition of a grand elder of cinema.
This dynamic is nothing new on the Lido...
Just last year, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door earned the Golden Lion—an award that in hindsight feels more like a tribute to his legacy than a celebration of that particular film. In a similar way, Father Mother Sister Brother doesn’t roar but purrs. While that may be enough in a weaker year, in 2025 the choice inevitably feels like a snub to films of greater urgency and vision.
Jarmusch, now in his early seventies, has long occupied a curious place in world cinema: both an indie icon and a reluctant participant in the machinery of festivals and awards. From the laconic cool of Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to the melancholic tenderness of Paterson (2016), his films have always existed slightly askew from their own time—deliberately minor, pared down, allergic to spectacle.
Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as siblings in FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
In Venice, he has been a familiar guest for decades, often treated with affection more than fervor. His cult status was cemented in the ’80s and ’90s, when Down by Law and Dead Man defined an American arthouse sensibility that was both poetic and sardonic. Yet the last decade has seen a more uneven trajectory: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) was a lush, late-career triumph, while The Dead Don’t Die (2019) divided audiences with its deadpan zombie satire.
Father Mother Sister Brother continues this pattern of late Jarmusch: modest in ambition, elliptical in style, reliant on familiar rhythms. It feels closer to a sketchbook than to a grand statement. Three riffs on family dynamics, rendered with his trademark detachment. That Venice chose to elevate this “minor” Jarmusch to the Lion says less about the film itself than about the stature of its maker.
What makes Jarmusch unusual among his contemporaries is precisely this refusal to play the auteur as oracle. His cinema has always been about smallness, about everyday gestures and half-spoken thoughts, about drifting rather than arriving. There’s an integrity in that consistency, but also a risk: when the films are slight, they can feel negligible.
Father Mother Sister Brother is a triptych: three stories centered on family, loosely connected by recurring visual and thematic motifs. Jarmusch laces each tale with echoes—a pale blue car, skateboarders, the overhead shot of a café table, a dialogue about water purity, a splash of dark red in the costumes (courtesy of Saint Laurent, which co-produced the film), and a running gag about “Uncle Bob.” These repetitions don’t build narrative unity so much as a kind of whimsical rhythm, Jarmusch’s way of stitching together fragments into a meditation on fractured domestic life.
In the first story, a brother and sister visit their father, only to suspect he is feigning poverty to play them against one another. The second follows a bestselling author who gathers her daughters for an annual ritual in Dublin—where one daughter fakes success and receives maternal favoritism, leaving the other sidelined and wounded. The third depicts twins returning to their late parents’ Paris apartment, reflecting on a legacy of eccentricity they’ve partly inherited.
Across all three, the key word is “pretend.” Parents perform versions of themselves, children fake lives they don’t lead, and the silences between them curdle into wounds that never heal. Jarmusch observes with detachment: there is no catharsis, no hidden reserves of love: only a kind of familial illiteracy, relationships built on denial rather than intimacy.
Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling co-star in FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
The ensemble cast blends familiar Jarmusch regulars—Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits—with newcomers like Vicky Krieps and Charlotte Rampling. They slip easily into his understated register, though the filmmaking itself is sometimes plain to the point of being aesthetically bland. The car scenes, with green-screened backdrops pasted against windshields, look cheap, almost careless. Stylistically, the film has little of the spark that defined Only Lovers Left Alive or even the eccentric messiness of The Dead Don’t Die.
So why the Golden Lion? Not because Father Mother Sister Brother is a masterpiece—it isn’t. Competently written and quietly affecting in moments, the film remains modest, never even reaching for the resonance of the competition’s strongest titles. I found it underwhelming; most critics, however, were kinder. It settled comfortably in the 70s on Metacritic, and the International Cinephile Society’s grid scored it respectably. Enough, perhaps, to warrant recognition—but hardly the kind of work that should carry the festival’s highest honor.
But it’s also clear that Jarmusch’s win reflects the jury’s balancing act. By awarding The Voice of Hind Rajab the Grand Jury Prize, Payne’s panel recognized its power while sidestepping the “political” label that would have come with the top prize. The result was a familiar compromise: the “we wanted to but couldn’t” prize for Tunisia, and a Golden Lion that doubled as homage to an American master, still wearing his dark glasses, muttering a sincere “Oh shit” as he collected his award.
Other omissions were just as striking. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Ildikó Enyedi’s delicate Silent Friend, and Valérie Donzelli’s biting À pied d’œuvre would all have made stronger choices for the Lion from the 21 film lineup —films that were formally ambitious or politically urgent, or simply more alive than Jarmusch’s measured triptych.
In the end, Father Mother Sister Brother is neither disaster nor masterpiece. It’s a minor work, an anthology of small fictions and unspoken truths, more a literary sketchbook than a defining statement. Awarding it the Golden Lion means Venice 82 will be remembered less for a single roaring masterpiece than for the uneasy balance between art, politics, and festival diplomacy.
The irony is that Jarmusch’s film itself is about pretending—families faking stability, children and parents performing for one another. Perhaps Payne’s jury was doing the same: pretending the Golden Lion can ever be more than a carefully staged performance of cinema, politics, and legacy.