Imagine one of those quiet dramas where a scattered clan heads to a lovely old place in the countryside to honor a birthday or an anniversary and it all turns into long talks, tears, and truths that have been waiting for years to come out. Now picture that same setup, but every door creaks like a warning, every conversation carries a strange fog, and the house itself feels like it is holding a breath. That is the sensation I got from The Sparrow in the Chimney, the new feature from the sibling team of Ramon and Silvan Zurcher. Ramon takes the lead here as director, writer, and editor, with Silvan producing. It is the third part of a loose set of films about messy kin relations and trapped feelings, following The Strange Kitten and The Girl and the Spider.
A colleague once wrote that The Girl and the Spider moved back and forth between cool detachment and puzzlement. That captures the temperature of this one too. The air feels controlled, chilly, just oblique enough to keep you wondering what you missed. Only this time, I found myself less enthralled. I felt pushed away by the choices, like I was being made to watch a dark parable in which each person is not a person but a sign. The film seems to want to be a chamber piece about the structure of domestic life. Arches. Pillars. Cracks. But as I watched, I found another interpretation tugging at me. I wondered if most of these folks are struggling with serious and untreated psychological pain. Then I wondered why the film works so hard to keep that interpretation out of the light.
At the center of this gathering, two sisters orbit each other with practiced distance. The older one is Karen, played with a haunting stillness by Maren Eggert. She lives with her husband Markus and their children on a faded but beautiful estate where the walls have seen too much. The younger sister, Julie, arrives with her partner Jurek and their kids, cheerful on the surface in the way a person tries to be when too much has happened. The property is a relic of their childhood. Their father passed some time ago, and their mother died more recently. The excuse for all this togetherness is Markus’ birthday. That is the banner. The real reason feels heavier. There is unfinished business that everyone has been skirting, and now they have run out of places to be.
There is also a young woman on the grounds named Liv. She is breathtaking and difficult to read. Is she private or wounded beyond words. She lives in a small cabin. She cares for children. She seems to play other roles in this household too, but the film asks you to squint and fill in the rest. We watch her from a distance and through half closed doors, and she looks back at no one.
The children are not really children, not in the way the adults want them to be. Johanna is the middle daughter, a teenager who moves and talks like a woman who has already lived too many lives. She toys with people, flirts, needles, plays with fire. Her student age body holds the heat of someone far older. The script gives her lines that sound like they floated out of a neon soaked noir. It is a strange fit. The film wants you to believe that she is both acting out and telling the truth that the adults cannot say aloud. But something about the writing tips her into caricature. We know the shape of her pain. The performance keeps hitting the same blade thin tone. She becomes less a person than a provocation.
Christina, the oldest sister, is away at school and late to the celebration. You can feel the anxiety around her return before she even walks through the door. When she finally shows up, it is obvious why everyone has been bracing. Johanna despises her. At least on the surface. The house hums with rivalries and grudges that feel ancient. There is a younger brother as well, Leon. A tender boy who cooks elaborate meals for everyone but hardly swallows a bite. He is talented and eager to serve and also the kid other kids pick on. He seems wired to absorb pain. In one of the early scenes, he shoves a metal rimmed dish into the microwave to see what happens, and the sparks fly. You do not need a lecture in symbolism to feel what is going on there.
Johanna lies, or maybe she does not, or she lies in a way that feels like telling. She says that Christina had terrible stomach pain as a child, and doctors found the remains of a twin sister that never made it to life tangled up inside her. A fist, she says, a tiny angry fist clenched in the gut. Later she says Liv stayed with them after a mental institution and that a house burned down. She says shocking things so calmly that your mind hesitates. There is so much filth under the carpet here. It is hard to tell which detail is a story and which one leaves a stain on your hands.
Some of the exchanges are so sharp they made me wince. Karen tells Johanna not to expect mercy because she has a disability. Johanna shoots back that being a mother does not force anyone to be loved. The whole clan talks like that. They wield ordinary voices and say vicious things as if they are remarks about the weather. A cookie appears in the kitchen and someone says they hope another person chokes on it. The language is so blunt that it turns into a style on its own. After a while you start waiting for proverb shapes like a call and response of insults. Someone says you are a monster. The other answers that the real monster is you. The film seems to tease a joke about the total absence of subtext. Everything is text, all the time.
The heart of the work is Karen’s stillness. She is unsettled in a way that drops a cold shadow over the rooms. She stares into blank air as if listening for someone who is no longer there. She speaks in a near whisper with a hypnotic rhythm. It is meant to be mesmerizing and a little frightening. For many viewers, it will call up the ghost of the great Swedish master who made films about people talking to God and failing. The images here borrow gestures from that kind of cinema. The actors drift in and out of frames as if gliding on invisible currents. The blocking is arranged so that a simple entrances feel estranged. The camera sits at a polite distance and regards these people with cool patience, as if recording a ritual that cannot be interrupted. It looks studied. It is also so controlled that it can feel like the movie is wearing someone else’s coat.
Julie is the brighter one, at first blush. She smiles and swallows and pours wine and offers to help with this and that. The shine is a surface. Both sisters grew up in a house that hurt them. The details of what they suffered are kept blurry and coy, which is probably the point. You can tell enough. Mental illness runs through their parentage like a river underground. A suicide sits in the background, unspoken for a long time and then not. Their childhood is not a memory so much as an echo that will not stop. That echo inhabits their partners, their children, their choices. There is a reason Markus sleeps in the basement while his wife drifts through rooms above, suspended and untouchable. The film plants that detail early and allows it to flower later.
Things go from odd to unsettling very quickly. Ordinary life continues but with a queasy twitch. The neighbor across the road is named Konrad. He comes over to slaughter chickens. We watch as the yard becomes a blood slick stage. Sprays of red land on faces. Julie gets caught in the splatter and hardly reacts. This is one of many moments where the film drifts toward cruelty to animals. Some viewers will find it unbearable. Others will see it as allegory. The sparrow clogging the chimney flaps and kicks inside the stone shaft, frantic to get free. You can easily map that onto the household. Each person is a bird trapped inside the history of this place. It is not hard to see the point. Still, there is a dissonance in how the people behave in response to actual death. Everyone seems numb or worse. It made me doubt the plausibility of some scenes. I know disturbed people. I do not know many who would greet a slaughter with a shrug.
For balance, there is also a quiet fascination with tiny living things that do not get crushed. Insects drift through shots. Caterpillars inch up leaves and are left alone. Butterflies wander in the dusk. Fireflies stitch blinking lines through the night air. They are granted a gentleness the bigger creatures are not. It is an odd grace.
No one can say that the Zurchers cannot build a mood. The control is precise. The tones are sustained. The whole film is like pressing on a bruise and refusing to stop. The images have a terrible beauty. And there is at least one sequence that I assume is a vision or a fever dream that ranks among the most disgusting things I have ever seen in a theater. You will know it when it arrives. You might want to look away. I almost did.
Yet the longer I sat with it, the more I started to suspect something like this. It felt as if the film began as a string of haunting pictures and unbearable tableaus. Then a story was laid down, like boards, under each one to hold it up. It is not a crime to start with images. Many great films do. But when you build the vessel that way, it can make the drama feel backward, an answer sheet filled in before the questions exist. After two hours of this my mind drifted. I know many viewers disagree. The early word around this one has been close to ecstatic. Maybe I am just the odd one at the party. I am fine with that. I prefer to tell you when a party leaves me cold.
There is something in the stance of the film that bothered me beyond simple preference. It is a matter of ethics, I guess. The work seems to treat its people like flints. Strike them together and watch the sparks. Hold them in the microwave and see what glows. There is a glimmer of sadism in how it toys with its own creations. Even when a scene rings true, an obliviousness floats under it. These people are imaginary. They do not feel pain in any real way. I know that. Still, I felt a kind of inhuman touch in the way the film keeps putting them in traps for the thrill of it. It makes a person queasy.
The performances are strong in a rigorous, coordinated way. Everyone commits to the hush and the precision. The design of the house is a character on its own, with rooms that look both lived in and abandoned. The soundscape is careful and exact. Whispered voices, creaks, the wet slap of blood, the crack of fire, all of it is placed so the audience notices and absorbs. You can admire the craft and still feel empty by the end. The emptiness is what stayed with me, more than any fear or grief or shock. The film loves the disquiet. It creates it masterfully. It just does not seem to have more to offer than the feeling itself.
I kept thinking about how grief works in less stylized life. It is messy and often plain. You forget and then you remember and then you are slammed by a smell or a song. Here, grief is turned into an art object. It is arranged and bracketed and delivered in stately frames. That can be beautiful. And yet, when the film draws upon real conditions like depression, psychosis, paranoia, or trauma from childhood, and then flattens them into design motifs, the result is troubling. It gave me the sense that the movie knows how to make sorrow look like a painting but does not want to deal with what it is.
The two sisters are drawn with a kind of sculptural care. Karen is the statue with a crack down the middle. Julie is the surface light. Their parents hover in the air like toxics. We barely ever see the specifics of what happened to them, and the gaps should be compelling. Sometimes gaps make a viewer lean in. Here the gaps felt like a hedge. I kept being told there were secrets, and then I kept being kept at a perfect distance from those secrets. Every now and then a small detail is planted in the first act that blooms later. Markus asleep in the basement. A line about something that ends up being a premonition. These touches show a plan. But they also reinforce that sense of reverse assembly, of causes derived from effects.
The children serve as wild cards. They cut through the ceremonies with actions that nobody can control. Leon with his cooking and self denial. Johanna with her taunts and seductions and hints about massacres hidden in memories. Christina as the ghost who returns with the past clinging to her like damp clothes. Each of them is a force splayed across a board game meant to represent home life. I wanted them to be more than the symbolic pieces they sometimes become.
If you admire austere cinema, precise compositions, and dialogue that stares at you without blinking, you may fall for this. The film locks in a tone and refuses to loosen its grip. It might be exactly what some people crave. It is elegant and clinical and one hundred percent committed to its approach. I respect that. At the same time, I cannot pretend I felt anything other than chilled and then numbed. I stepped out of the theater with a feeling I do not like to have. I felt as though I had been made complicit in something unkind.
A last thought about humor. The picture does not have much that looks like laughs. Still, there is a streak of deadpan that nods to jokes from elsewhere. People say the most obvious things about each other as if they are revelations, like a winking riff on that online line about subtext and how only timid writers rely on it. It is a cute touch for a minute, and then it becomes another way to tell us that the film likes to show its gears. What you see is what you get. There is no labyrinth to walk. The labyrinth is a painting of a labyrinth. Beautiful. Flat.
The Sparrow in the Chimney is a strong piece of filmmaking technique and a severe sit. It has images I will not forget. It has a mood I can respect. It also has a heart that beats so faintly I had to strain to hear it. It builds a house of grief and then stands outside to admire its angles. By the end I was disquieted, yes, but for reasons I doubt were intended. It is not a puzzle that unlocks with time. It is a display that asks us to marvel at how well it has been arranged.
Many critics have embraced it. Good for them. I am content to be the person who write no thanks in the guest book while others leave hearts. I wish the film had been braver about the thing it circles. I wish it had given its people more than the chance to suffer beautifully. There is a sparrow somewhere in there, thrashing in the chimney, desperate for air. The work knows this. It puts the image on screen. Then it leaves the bird fluttering, wings tearing against stone, to make a point about captivity. I wanted someone to open the flue. I wanted somebody, anybody, to care.
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