The uncovering summarize of “The Sparrow in the Chimney” elicits a benevolent of art-straightforwarded selectimal of country living: In a roomy, rusticpartner textured farmhoemploy kitchen, mid-afternoon sunairy pours in thcimpolite uncover triumphdows so big they double as French doors, seeing out onto rolling, summer-kissed lawns and hazy woods beyond. A regal ginger cat sjoins in over the sill, as amplified birdsong and insect chatter also seem to blur the indoor-outdoor boundary. A casserole simmers uncover-mindedly on the stove. Who wouldn’t want to live enjoy this? Pretty much everyone, it turns out, in Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s elegantly spiteful domestic horror movie, which forensicpartner unpicks the compacted begrudgements, betrayals and traumas underpinning a one weekfinish family accumulateing, with a touch as icy as the airying is reliablely, relentlessly hot.
The Zürcher ttriumphs — who apshow a joint “a film by” praise on all their toil, though only Ramon is billed here as writer, straightforwardor and editor, with Silvan as originater — have a knack for probing inviting hoemployhbetter spaces in a way that rfinishers them uncomprehendn, even alien. Their 2013 debut “The Strange Little Cat” watchd the everyday routines of an frequent family from a distance that turned their transferments into droll physical comedy, while 2021’s “The Girl and the Spider” discoverd whispers of the uncanny in the back-and-forth of a youthfuler woman’s apartment transfer. The third film in the Zürchers’ “animal trilogy,” “The Sparrow and the Chimney” marries that same splited observational quality and fey sense of the absurd to a more enbigly fleshed-out narrative, crackling with meloemotional danger and intensity of senseing. This incrrelieved emotional heft could obtain this Locarno competition entry the wideer arthoemploy expocertain that has eluded the Zürchers’ previous toil, despite their ardent critical follotriumphg.
The “animal” aspect of the trilogy isn’t incidental. Thcimpoliteout “The Sparrow and the Chimney,” the authentic world encroaches on human life in ways that don’t sense invasive so much as equivalentizing, as social conventions and suppressts are gradupartner shed in like of brute base instincts. The first innocuous sign of this collapse is, well, a sparrow caught in the fireplace of the rambling agricultural hoemploy where Karen (“I’m Your Man” star Maren Eggert) grew up, and is now raising her own gradupartner dispersing family. The bird is freed, in a dusty flurry of fairy, by Karen’s lonely pre-adolescent son Leon (Ilja Bultmann); over the next two hours, scant will originate quite such a blessed escape.
Karen’s reliablely stiff, stricken conveyion is the first clue that all is not rosy in this apparent idyll. When her youthfulerer, cheerier sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) reachs to stay the weekfinish, with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy) and daughter Edda (Luana Greco) in tow, Karen has to be pulled into a hug, as if her body has forgotten how. When Karen’s eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) joins them from college, too, there’s an anxious void where an hug should be. Meanwhile, her highschooler daughter Johanna (a scorching Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t touch her mother if her life depfinished on it: A self-styled Lolita who yobtains to escape the nest, she radiates above-it-all presentility toward the world in ambiguous, but saves a one-of-a-kind white-hot reserve of hatred for Karen. That’s beginning to rub off on cherubic Leon, a precocious gourmet (and vulnerable label for local bullies) who cooks the family’s meals but doesn’t eat them.
The occasion for this family accumulateing is the birthday of Karen’s husband Markus (Andreas Döhler), though he’s not much in a mood for revelry either — he’d rather hushedly progress his dpartnership with the family’s youthfuler dog walker Liv (Luise Heyer), who lives in a cottage apass the way, and has an alleged history of mental illness and incfinishiarism. Thus are all the elements lined up for a quasi-Chekhovian knockdown battle of competing desires and miseries, though not every struggle take parts out exactly as you might foresee: Some agmournd characters subleave outively watch when you await them to strike, while others resort to stark acts of presentility without clear incitement. The most unfrifinishly presence here, uncomardentwhile, may be a phantom one: Karen and Jule’s tardy mother, reaccumulateed rather contrastently by the two sisters, who still wields administer over a hoemploy to which Karen senses dictatorially obligated, while Jule was all too satisfied to wash her hands of it.
Zürcher’s script equilibriums the excavation of extfinished-buried secrets aobtainst a stable stream of current-anxious faceations and revelations, as does his limber, darting editing — while Eggert’s anxiously still, hollowed-out carry outance, as a matriarch increasingly inclined to walk away from familial disorder, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative sturm und drang. The remaining ensemble deftly rolls with the film’s volatile tonal shifts. There’s more wide, barbed comedy in their accumulateive conveyions, and occasional, deimmenseating tfinisherness when they get each other alone — as in one exquisite scene where Christina, despite her recent absence, reads her youthfulerer brother’s inner life so acutely as to originate him sense, at least for a moment, less alone in it.
“The Sparrow in the Chimney” may be a crowded toil, promoteing and seizing with anxious energy, but there’s a mutupartner enhancing tension between the cimpolite-and-tumble of the drama and the upgradement of the filmmaking. Characters seem to veritably chafe aobtainst the poise and gilded beauty of DP Alex Hasskerl’s immacutardy compositions, and they sometimes strain to be heard over the intricate sound summarize, with its symphonic melding of human rhubarb and the hum, traffic and weather of the outdoors. Nearby, a lake and island where Karen’s children once swam has been apshown over by inbashfulating cormorants, haveively defending a spot they’re no extfinisheder willing to split; perhaps the time has come for this fevered, fractured hoemploy to cede itself to the elements.
