Father Mother Sister Brother ★★★

Availability: Theatrical release in the US is scheduled by distributor Mubi for December 24, 2025. No streaming information is available at this time. See JustWatch here for future online rental and purchase information.

Follow the Rolex?

With the title “Father Mother Sister Brother,” one might assume that the subject is two parents and their children, and that the protagonists are all related. Nope.

Instead, legendary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch offers 3 distinct episodes, each with its own sibling duo (in Episode 3 they’re Black and fraternal twins). The father in Episode 1 (“Father”) is not related to the mother in Episode 2 (“Mother”), and the parents in Episode 3 (“Sister Brother”) are recently dead. Despite a smattering of elements that appear in 2 or even all 3 episodes—a Rolex watch that might be real or fake, the punchline “And Bob’s your uncle,” the questions “can you toast with water?” and “do I have to deal with it now?, a common floor lamp, and driving to the family home in automobiles—the episodes are essentially unrelated. You’ll want to put “the family” together, but it won’t work.

What’s going on?

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The episodes are essentially unrelated. You’ll want to put “the family” together, but it won’t work.

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After the first two episodes, one theme seems clear: parents and their children don’t know how to talk to each other, or don’t want to. The estrangement is deep. In Episode 1, Emily (Mayim Bialik, of TV’s “Jeopardy”) and Jeff (Adam Driver in his third Jarmusch film) haven’t seen their father (Tom Waits, in his sixth Jarmusch appearance) in 2 years. Having driven deep into the New Jersey hills to be with him, they depart after just a few hours spent in halting awkwardness. They don’t have much to say to each other, either.

Above from left, Cate Blanchett as the rigid Timothea, Vicky Krieps as her older, but emotionally younger sister Lilith, and their emotionally distant mother (Charlotte Rampling) at the mother's formal, annual tea (that's the only time they get together).

In Episode 2, Timothea (Cate Blanchett at her glorious stiffest) and hippie adult-chick Lilith (Vicky Krieps) go to mother’s house (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin for an excruciating annual “tea” that makes the conversation in Episode 1 seem downright entertaining.

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Perhaps Jarmusch is telling us that parents are the obstacle to meaningful interaction, and it’s best to have them out of the way.

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The twins in Episode 3 (Luka Sabbat as Billy, Indya Moore as Skye), having lost their pilot parents in a private plane crash in the Azores, visit the now empty Paris apartment where they were raised. Unlike the other sibling sets, they can actually carry on a conversation. Perhaps Jarmusch is telling us that parents are the obstacle to meaningful interaction, and it’s best to have them out of the way.

Above twins Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) look over the few possessions

left in their deceased parents' Paris apartment, where they grew up.

There are other goings on that may or may not be central to Jarmusch’s message. All the episodes feature “stuff”: Tom Waits’s cluttered and disordered home in Episode 1; Rampling’s over-elaborate, over-ordered, tea-table setting (photographed from above, for emphasis) in Episode 2; and in Episode 3, a packed-to-the-gills storage unit, where a lifetime of parental possessions has become not only inaccessible but irrelevant. Perhaps Jarmusch is telling us that too much accumulation, too many things, is bad. But is that perception worthy of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion?

Adam Driver is Jeff, the uptight son of a father, played by Tom Waits at his idiosyncratic best. The family DNA seems not to have passed down from father to son.

Jarmusch’s avant-garde reputation is hard-earned and well-deserved, and it’s possible that “Father Mother Sister Brother,” for all its evocation of boredom and stasis, is an under-cover celebration of a seminal Jarmusch quality: eccentricity. As it turns out, Waits-the-father is more and less than he seems (the landline is not his only phone, nor the broken-down truck his only vehicle), and than he wants his uptight children to realize. Rampling’s mother has another life as a successful author of romance novels she won’t discuss with her daughters, and Lillith, like Waits’s father (we don’t know her own) is an outlier who keeps secrets and is a master of the minor scam. The kids in Episode 3 congratulate themselves for being cool (not “square”), the product—they surmise—of their risk-taking and document-faking Mom and Dad. The act of putting their parents’ past lives in storage serves as a reasonable metaphor for boxing up whatever strictures come with being “raised.”

Their father (Tom Waits) watching his children leave after their 2 hours of stilted interaction. He seems to be thinking, "Please, are they gone yet?"

Action/adventure films present driving as a form of liberation; for Jarmusch it has another valence, as an activity conducted within a system of physical limits and restrictions and governed by rules and regulations, complete with stilted conversations (Emily and Jeff) and the need to get out of the car (Billy and Skye) to have coffee and something resembling fresh talk. With a touch of the scammer in him, Billy puts a fake parking ticket on his car to keep from getting a real one.

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Skateboarders appear in all 3 episodes...free of the brittleness of modern life.

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Jarmusch contrasts the ordered confinement to which the automobile is subject to the freedom of “skaters”—that is, skateboarders—who appear in all 3 episodes, carving outlandish turns at intersections, riding on the “wrong” side of the road, engaging in intimate if silent dialogue with other skaters, lost in their own organic, lyrical ballet, free of yellow lines, “no entry” signs, and the brittleness of modern life.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” is an enigma bleeding into incoherence. It’s about—let’s say it’s probably about—the struggle faced by creative “outsiders” in forging and maintaining an “authentic life,” a project that may require a parent to distance himself from the children, a child to distance herself from a parent, or the courage to get on a skateboard. Easier said than done, just as Jarmusch’s film is easier seen than understood.

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He says: Too much work. About as much fun as taking a final exam. Jarmusch’s “Megalopolis”?

She says:  “Hoarders” meets “Storage Wars.” Is an older Jarmusch obsessed with what’s going to happen with his stuff?

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Date: US release date scheduled for December 24, 2025

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Luka Sabbat, Indya Moore

Countries: United States; producers hail also from Italy, France, Ireland, Germany

Language: English, some French subtitled in English

Runtime: 110 minutes

Other Awards: One nomination and 1 win, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival