There’s one thing electrifying about watching a filmmaker break away from well-worn formulation and push themselves into new, uncharted territory. The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zürcher’s third function, is the ultimate installment in a trilogy of extremely flammable chamber dramas. Anybody conversant in the earlier two, 2013’s The Unusual Little Cat and 2021’s The Lady and the Spider––the latter written and directed with twin brother Silvan, who’s produced all his sibling’s initiatives––will seemingly keep in mind the conflict between their austere mise-en-scène and the tempestuous conflicts that coursed by them. Captured in largely static photographs amongst contained locales (an condominium, a home) and timeframes (Cat spanned a day, Spider two), the movies counsel workout routines in geometry whose immaculate compositions are at all times on the verge of collapsing. Pushing towards their steely facades are household feuds, acts of wanton cruelty, and violence; watching them, the rigidity at instances is so insufferable you’re left crouching in anticipation for the body to burst.
However these portraits of dysfunctional households additionally radiate one thing else: a eager eye for the surreal and the oneiric. The titular feline in The Unusual Little Cat isn’t unusual in any respect, however the movie itself is, mining the mundanity of a middle-class household for moments of marvel and folly. Objects and folks routinely insurgent towards the Zürchers’ formalism: a glass bottle spinning on the range; a ball flying by the kitchen window; buttons popping off of shirts; to not point out the members of the family themselves and the unsettling anecdotes they relay at one another in a flat-affect tone, as if none of them have been actually there, have been actually current––no matter “there” and “present” may presumably imply. So it is for Spider, in which a few buddies and former roommates half methods as soon as one in every of them strikes into a brand new area, a course of that’s continuously derailed by odd exchanges and detours. A few of these really feel cribbed straight out of a fairy story: an aged girl who reveals up like a witch in the center of a summer time storm, a downstairs neighbor who solely crawls out of his flat at evening. Each options unfurl in a gossamer of uncanny particulars that frustrate all causal explanations; as a personality muses in Spider, it’s “as if a secret force were holding everything together.”
Cat and Spider each poked at that invisible, dreamlike pressure, however by no means totally surrendered to it, which gave technique to a peculiar edge-of-the-cliff feeling, as if the movies have been continuously threatening to enterprise into a special actuality altogether however by no means totally managed. This is what, in my guide, makes the Zürchers’ cinema so gripping, and why The Sparrow in the Chimney feels so exhilarating.
In its most simple phrases, the movie considerations Karen (Maren Eggert), a middle-aged mom of three who watches her life unravel over a weekend household reunion at her countryside dwelling. To date so Zürchers, and certainly Sparrow begins by ticking all the siblings’ tropes. There are internecine frictions between kin, blithe micro and macro aggressions, and pets observing the motion like cautious sentinels. But this is additionally the story of a liberation. Firmly rooted in the perspective of its lead character – to a level the extra choral Cat and Spider arguably weren’t – Sparrow follows Karen as she struggles to navigate her position in a household from which she’s grown distant, virtually detached. All the pieces about her suggests resentment. Shortly after her mom died, Karen moved with husband and youngsters again to her outdated childhood farmhouse the place a lot of Sparrow unfolds, an exquisite cottage nonetheless haunted by some traumatic childhood reminiscences. She married a person who’s now dishonest on her with the next-door neighbor; spiteful and misanthropic (“a world without people,” she hisses sooner or later, “that would be paradise”) she has resigned to a life whose default emotion is one in every of bilious anger, nowhere extra ferocious than in her fights with teenage daughter Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss).
But Sparrow works towards that. As the household gathering strikes towards its climax, Karen slowly opens as much as the energies floating round her––which is to say she rouses from her emotional torpor, the movie itself awakening along with her. Shot by Alex Hasskerl, who’d additionally lensed Cat and Spider, there are sequences in Sparrow that subvert the siblings’ conventional visible grammar. Initially static, the camerawork turns into extra sinuous, as if adjusting to Karen’s looser grip on actuality; after virtually an hour and half spent watching her by largely locked-in medium photographs, the Steadicam sequences that observe her by the home in the direction of the finish are nothing in need of liberating. Appreciation for her journey will rely on how lengthy you may abdomen a determine who’s virtually comically unlikeable––the form of grouch so devoid of empathy she typically stares at her youngsters as in the event that they have been members of an alien species. However the rewards are loads. Sparrow is a ultimate chapter that retroactively sheds mild on its predecessors, grafting their aptitude for the fantastical onto a narrative that’s not afraid to discover that vein to its extremes till the movie swells right into a dream, the psychodrama right into a horror. Ghosts seem; identities swap; the border between what’s actual and what isn’t turns into porous.
There’s no denying the stiffness of a few of the most overtly symbolic photos, like the recurrent view of a putrid island infested with cormorants at the heart of an otherwise-idyllic close by lake, the rotten core in Karen’s ostensibly pristine life. However there’s one thing so honest about the Zürchers’ method that makes even the most hamfisted thrives indicate the expressions of a totally uncensored, unbridled imaginative and prescient. With its deep, daring dives into the nightmarish and the surreal, The Sparrow in the Chimney is that uncommon movie that seems like a catharsis for protagonist and director each.
The Sparrow in the Chimney premiered at the 2024 Locarno Movie Pageant.
