Swiss brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher have developed a bold signature approach in films that transform sunlit, middle-class homes into uncanny spaces of suggestion, desire and resentment, and their distinctive talent is in full flight in The Sparrow and the Chimney, screening in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival. It’s the third feature in their “animal trilogy,” after 2013’s playful, eerie Strange Little Cat, and The Girl and the Spider, which won a Berlinale Encounters section Best Director Award in 2021. The unsettling ambiguities and perverse breaks with mundane reality typical of these earlier works, human dramas in which other creatures and even inaminate objects also seem charged with mystery, are ramped up into explosive and cutting psychological horror in The Sparrow and the Chimney, for a film that is just as elliptical, but is their darkest, most thrilling yet. Ramon has full directing and writing credits, with Silvan on board as producer, for this unsettling vision of inter-generational discord and violent urges, in which a two-day family gathering in the countryside loses all pretense of pleasantries as terrible secrets from the house’s past re-emerge, and a roaring blaze might just promise release and renewal from all that is broken.
German actress Maren Eggert, who also starred in Angela Schanelec’s 2019 festival darling I Was at Home, But), is enigmatic and mesmerising to watch as Karen, the House’s tensely wound and troubled matriarch. Pressure mounts on the eve of the birthday of her husband Markus (Andreas Döhler), when her cheerier sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) arrives to stay. The airy, bright house where the sisters grew up together and its tree-filled surrounds seem idyllic at first glance, but as the two families crowd in, a vicious undercurrent of violence and an illicit air of sexual rivalry bubbles over on multiple fronts. This is a family as fractured as the gold-rimmed dish that, mistakenly put in the microwave by one of the children, sparks and cracks apart.
Karen is provoked by the animosity and flirtatious acting-out of her cigarette-smoking teen Johanna (Lea Zoe Voss), who delights in decimating the composure of her uncle Jurek (Milian Zerzawy). She’s also unsettled by her sister’s visceral reactions to being back in the realm of their now deceased, controlling mother, and by the clandestine incursion into her marriage of Liv (Luise Heyer), a dog walker rumoured to have a criminal past and history of mental instability, who lives in a cottage across the way. Among the hand-drawn cards and butter biscuits of homely comfort, clothing is purposefully torn in the wash, there are threats to gouge out eyes or set people on fire, and outrageous flirtations are spied. The animal world is also alert to the chaos, as the pet dogs bark at a sparrow trapped inside, and a headless chicken flaps around the yard, fresh from the blade of an axe. Uninvited gazes look through open windows and unlocked doors, as the house comes to seem like a living entity, that can swallow people up or redirect their attention toward monstrous or unsavoury encounters and power games. Even ratatouille casually staining a shirt takes on the ominous appearance of spilled blood.
The birds are so loud here they scream rather than cry, someone points out, and it’s unsettling details like this from the not-so-natural world of this woodland locale that feed into a masterfully layered soundtrack, with crescendoes of discord. As the core family tragedy emerges that has been spoken little of since it occurred in the cellar years back, but which seems to have pushed everything since out of joint, the latent brutality and grief sleeping in the walls of the house becomes more overt. The evening’s garden party blooms into a hallucinatory dreamscape with a ghostly pool presence and otherworldly neon touches, and a denouement at once horrifying and glorious, as the family welcomes a clearing away of the old for the potential of something new.
Director, Screenwriter, Editing: Ramon Zürcher
Cast: Maren Eggert, Britta Hammelstein, Luise Heyer, Andreas Döhler, Lea Zoe Voss, Milian Zerzawy, Ilja Bultmann, Paula Schindler, Luana Greco
Producer: Silvan Zürcher
Cinematographer: Alex Hasskerl
Music: Balz Bachmann
Sound: Balthasar Jucker
Sound Design: Peter von Siebenthal, Ramon Zürcher
Production Design: Peter Scherz
Production company: Zürcher Film (Switzerland), SRF/SRG SSR (Switzerland)
Sales: Cercamon
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In German
117 minutes
