A faint aura of creeping dread hovers over Family Portrait, a highly atmospheric and meticulously crafted first feature from young Texas-born writer-director Lucy Kerr. Coming to cinema after a background in choreography, philosophy and visual art, Kerr sustains this cryptic ambience throughout her slender ensemble drama, leaving many things unsaid and unresolved. This lightly experimental approach will likely limit her potential audience to the festival and indie art-house margins, but this is still a striking exercise in visual finesse, tonal control and mood-building. Screening at El Gouna film festival this week, Kerr’s hauntingly strange debut is great calling card for her future directing career.
Kerr opens Family Portrait with a quote from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Conqueror Worm: “through a circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot”. One of Poe’s personal favourites, the poem is a lurid depiction of humans as lowly creatures condemned to confused, futile, repetitive lives and inevitable, grisly deaths. Quite how this relates to the characters on screen is unclear, but there is certainly plenty of confusion in this enigmatic drama, as well as an unseen but grim-sounding off-screen death.
Kerr shot Family Portrait in and around her grandparents’ handsome rural home in Kerrville, Texas, which may indicate autobiographical intent, or financial necessity, or both. As a multi-generational gathering draws to its end, Katy (Deragh Campbell) and her mother Barbara (Silvana Jakich) are struggling to corral all the extended family members for a Christmas card photo. Outwardly, everyone seems willing to make the shot happen, and yet they are all distracted by random conversational tangents, minor domestic issues, and shock news of a distant relative’s suddenly death from a mysterious illness, possibly an opaque reference to the early days of Covid.
Observed in series of snapshot vignettes, the family members are absorbed by a comically random range of topics: how Americans mistake the Polish accent for Russian, alien invasion, revision for a high school chemisty test, online video surveillance of a college coffee machine, and more. These scattered exchanges feel highly naturalistic, more like eavesdopping on real conversations than scripted dialogue. They are disconnected fragments, but loosely linked by their recurring sense of paranoid unease and distrust of official narratives.
In one key scene, Katy’s showboating father (Robert Salas) shares a much-told family anecdote about photo of a relative who fought in World War II being manipulated and presented as a fake Vietnam war shot. Another discussion touches on John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), a darkly satirical cult sci-fi classic that reveals the dystopian fascist horrorscape lurking below the surface of blandly confirmist consumer society. Kerr keeps these tiny thematic hints elusive and allusive, but they may be intended to subtly echo her subtly implied message that taking a perfect objective portrait is impossible.
As Katy becomes increasingly obsessive about securing the photo, Barbara mysteriously disappears. This is the closest thing to a plot twist in Family Portrait, shifting the narrative mode into an thriller of sorts, but a thriller which owes more to the existential ellipses of Michelangelo Antonioni or the elusive allegories of Apichatpong Weerasethakul than to Hollywood suspense conventions. Indeed, Kerr cites Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2005) as an influence on the film’s bifurcated narrative, which climaxes with a suspensful detour into the woods and a dreamlike, beautifully filmed underwater sequence.
Kerr and her cinematographer Lidia Nikonova shoot Family Portrait with great poise and precision, making elegant use of slow zooms, extended Steadicam glides and artfully framed still-life tableaux. She also uses nature as a constant and unsettling background presence, intercutting the human scenes with deserted riverside vistas and intense close-ups of vivid orange caterpillars rolling through lush garden foliage. Sound design is deployed to quietly powerful effect too, with mysterious drones blanking out human voices at times, and the subtle hiss of wind-rustled trees amplified to almost deafening volume. There is great style and technique at play here, very impressive for a debut feature. Hopefully Kerr can apply these experimental methods to more substantial narratives in future, because she clearly has plenty to say, even if she is still figuring out the best way to express herself.
Director, screenwriter: Lucy Kerr
Cast: Deragh Campbell, Chris Galust, Rachel Alig, Katie Folger, Robert Salas, Silvana Jakich
Cinematography: Lidia Nikonova
Editing: Karlis Bergs
Sound: Nikolay Antonov, Andrew Siedenburg
Producer: Megan Pickrell, Frederic Winkler
Production companies: Insufficient Funds (US), Conjuring Productions (US)
World Sales: Lights On Films
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Official Selection, out of Competition)
In English
75 minutes
