The opening body of “The Sparrow in the Chimney” evokes a form of art-directed splendid of nation residing: In a spacious, rustically textured farmhouse kitchen, mid-afternoon daylight pours in by way of open home windows so giant they double as French doorways, looking onto rolling, summer-kissed lawns and hazy woods past. A regal ginger cat slinks in over the sill, as amplified birdsong and bug chatter additionally appear to blur the indoor-outdoor boundary. A casserole simmers patiently on the range. Who wouldn’t need to dwell like this? Just about everybody, it seems, in Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s elegantly vicious home horror film, which forensically unpicks the compacted resentments, betrayals and traumas underpinning a single weekend household gathering, with a contact as icy because the lighting is persistently, relentlessly heat.
The Zürcher twins — who take a joint “a movie by” credit score on all their work, although solely Ramon is billed right here as author, director and editor, with Silvan as producer — have a knack for probing inviting family areas in a method that renders them unfamiliar, even alien. Their 2013 debut “The Unusual Little Cat” noticed the on a regular basis routines of an strange household from a distance that turned their actions into droll bodily comedy, whereas 2021’s “The Woman and the Spider” situated whispers of the uncanny within the back-and-forth of a younger girl’s condo transfer. The third movie within the Zürchers’ “animal trilogy,” “The Sparrow and the Chimney” marries that very same indifferent observational high quality and fey sense of the absurd to a extra elaborately fleshed-out narrative, crackling with melodramatic hazard and depth of feeling. This elevated dramatic heft may earn this Locarno competitors entry the broader arthouse publicity that has eluded the Zürchers’ earlier work, regardless of their ardent important following.
The “animal” side of the trilogy isn’t incidental. All through “The Sparrow and the Chimney,” the pure world encroaches on human life in ways in which don’t really feel invasive a lot as equalizing, as social conventions and restraints are progressively shed in favor of brute base instincts. The primary innocuous signal of this collapse is, effectively, a sparrow caught within the fire of the rambling rural home the place Karen (“I’m Your Man” star Maren Eggert) grew up, and is now elevating her personal progressively dispersing household. The fowl is freed, in a dusty flurry of flight, by Karen’s lonely pre-adolescent son Leon (Ilja Bultmann); over the subsequent two hours, few will make fairly such a fortunate escape.
Karen’s persistently stiff, stricken expression is the primary clue that every one is just not rosy on this obvious idyll. When her youthful, cheerier sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) arrives to remain the weekend, together with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy) and daughter Edda (Luana Greco) in tow, Karen needs to be pulled right into a hug, as if her physique has forgotten how. When Karen’s eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) joins them from faculty, too, there’s an anxious void the place an embrace must be. In the meantime, her highschooler daughter Johanna (a scorching Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t contact her mom if her life relied on it: A self-styled Lolita who yearns to flee the nest, she radiates above-it-all hostility towards the world basically, however saves a particular white-hot reserve of hatred for Karen. That’s starting to rub off on cherubic Leon, a precocious gourmand (and susceptible mark for native bullies) who cooks the household’s meals however doesn’t eat them.
The event for this household gathering is the birthday of Karen’s husband Markus (Andreas Döhler), although he’s not a lot in a temper for revelry both — he’d quite quietly proceed his dalliance with the household’s younger canine walker Liv (Luise Heyer), who lives in a cottage throughout the way in which, and has an alleged historical past of psychological sickness and arson. Thus are all the weather lined up for a quasi-Chekhovian knockdown battle of competing wishes and miseries, although not each battle performs out precisely as you would possibly predict: Some aggrieved characters passively watch if you anticipate them to strike, whereas others resort to stark acts of violence with out apparent provocation. Probably the most aggressive presence right here, in the meantime, could also be a phantom one: Karen and Jule’s late mom, remembered quite in a different way by the 2 sisters, who nonetheless wields management over a home to which Karen feels oppressively obligated, whereas Jule was all too completely happy to scrub her fingers of it.
Zürcher’s script balances the excavation of long-buried secrets and techniques towards a gentle stream of present-tense confrontations and revelations, as does his limber, darting enhancing — whereas Eggert’s tensely nonetheless, hollowed-out efficiency, as a matriarch more and more inclined to stroll away from familial chaos, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative sturm und drang. The remaining ensemble deftly rolls with the movie’s unstable tonal shifts. There’s extra broad, barbed comedy of their collective interactions, and occasional, devastating tenderness after they get one another alone — as in a single beautiful scene the place Christina, regardless of her latest absence, reads her youthful brother’s internal life so acutely as to make him really feel, at the least for a second, much less alone in it.
“The Sparrow within the Chimney” could also be a crowded work, sparking and seizing with nervous power, however there’s a mutually enhancing pressure between the rough-and-tumble of the drama and the refinement of the filmmaking. Characters appear to usually chafe towards the poise and gilded fantastic thing about DP Alex Hasskerl’s immaculate compositions, they usually generally pressure to be heard over the intricate sound design, with its symphonic melding of human rhubarb and the hum, site visitors and climate of the outside. Close by, a lake and island the place Karen’s kids as soon as swam has been taken over by intimidating cormorants, possessively guarding a spot they’re not keen to share; maybe the time has come for this fevered, fractured home to cede itself to the weather.
