By Jason Osiason

Father Mother Sister Brother is such a lovely, gentle and unassumingly shattering film. I walked into the new Jarmusch expecting a low-key hangout movie, some nice deadpan, a few chuckles. Instead I got kinda wrecked? This one sneaks up on you.

Father Mother Sister Brother is a triptych, three short stories about adult kids and the parents they can’t quite reach. In the first, Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings driving out to rural New Jersey to check on their reclusive father, played by Tom Waits. In the second, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps are sisters summoned to Dublin for a stiff annual visit with their elegant novelist mother, Charlotte Rampling. And in the third, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play twins in Paris, sorting through their late parents’ apartment. Same shape every time. Kids show up. Parents deflect. Nobody says the real thing out loud.

What sneaks up on you is how hard-hitting this dramedy actually is underneath all the deadpan. It’s a film about the impact of being raised by our parents, how they shape us whether we’re copying them or running from them, and whether we ever truly know them at all. Honestly, the repetition is the point. Jarmusch keeps rhyming the segments, the awkward silences, the small lies, the way every kid turns twelve again the second they walk through the door, and it stops feeling like a gimmick and becomes the whole design.

Tom Waits continues to be the most singularly extraordinary actor. He barely does anything. A shrug, a sly look, a mumbled non-answer, and somehow a whole lifetime of choices and regrets is just sitting there in the room. Him and Driver circling each other over coffee, two men who clearly love each other and have zero idea how to say it, might be the funniest and saddest double act of the year. And Blanchett swings the complete opposite way in the Dublin story, all politeness and armor, with Rampling quietly devastating across the tea table.

But the third short particularly crushed me. After two chapters of kids failing to figure out their living parents, Jarmusch hands us two who don’t get the chance anymore. Watching Moore and Sabbat drift through that Paris apartment picking up their parents’ things one by one is the whole movie in one image. You spend your whole life trying to figure your parents out and in the end all you get is their stuff. I did not expect this movie to hit me like that. It fully did.

Sure, it’s slight by design, and if Jarmusch’s shaggy, unhurried rhythms have never worked for you, this won’t be the one that converts you. But the gentleness is the whole trick. A quiet little comedy about the people we know least and love most, and it left me a wreck. Loving this stretch of late Jarmusch. [A-]