Jim Jarmusch explores the awkwardness and closeness of parents with their grownup children in three slyly comic panels of drama set in rural USA, Dublin and Paris.
The three stories all concern the relationships between adult children, their somewhat distant parent (or parents), and each other. Each of the three chapters takes place in the present, and each in a different country.
Siblings Emily (Mayim Bialik) and Jeff (Adam Driver), making the arduous trip out into the countryside to see their ageing (and sneaky) dad (Tom Waits). Meanwhile, in Dublin, Charlotte Rampling plays a characteristically self-possessed and self-assured woman who is welcoming her two grownup daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) for their annual visit for tea. She is entirely content to make these visits a rarity. In Paris, non-identical twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) pay a final visit to their parents’ apartment. The parents have recently died, apparently piloting a light aircraft in the Azores. The film seems to ask: who are our parents? Did they have real existences before we were born that we will never understand? And are our own existences destined to be effaced and rendered irrelevant or taboo by our own children? This is a subtly haunting and wryly funny triptych that transforms the banal awkwardness of family life into a bittersweet meditation on the bonds that persist.
USA 2025 Jim Jarmusch 110m
