Father Mother Sister Brother belongs to a sizeable subsection of Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre: works that exist somewhere between feature-length films and compilations of short films. It consists of three roughly forty-minute vignettes, each of which traces the late stage in a family dynamic where there’s not much more to say, or that can be said. All three revolve around estrangements that are years, even decades in the making, so gradual and subtle that the family members involved can likely no longer explain them any more. In keeping with the quietness and reserve of Jarmusch’s late work, the first two stories, in particular, are sufused with the stylised politeness of families who have drifted apart incrementally yet inexorably, and quietly settled into their own established ways of being together alone, all of which involve a highly scripted intimacy and curated self-disclosure. All the stories focus on the peculiar experience of adults in their parents’ houses, with no children around, and the first two stories detail a yearly visit. Both of these visits feel like they could be the last for some time, so it feels right that the third story revolves around a pair of twins who visit their parents’ home for the very last time, after they have died suddenly in a light air crash.

All of this could be glib with another director but the veneer of “normality” is too precarious for each of these families – it takes too much work to maintain it – for the film to ever feel deadpan. Likewise, there’s a wonderful dynamic and wryly comic sense of alienation to Jarmusch’s palette, which is enhanced by the fact that each of these stories involves a visit; for all the trademark slowness, each story is bookended by travelling to and from the event in question. Just as Freud asserted that the trip to therapy was a part of therapy, so these journeys to and from the family home, the site of the primal scene, feel laden with meaning, and in some cases, tell us much more about the adult children’s experiences with their parents than their face-to-face encounters. Given the scripted nature of these encounters, the trip to and from the family gatherings allow us to glimpse the adult children putting on or taking off their personae, although never quite enough for us to glean the full truth of the scenario. In each story, one or more of the characters gazes from their car window at a group of skateboarders passing by, like a fantasy of spontaneity, of total selfhood, that remains unavailable even when they are preparing to put on or take off their family garb.

The first story revolves around a pair of siblings, Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) who are driving to visit their father (Tom Waits) in a wintry rural American landscape. There’s a beautiful dynamic between these two siblings that feels true to life – Emily has created a self-contained world that her father cannot enter but feels slightly self-alienated in the process, whereas Jeff has committed more to a relationship with his father but speaks more sparingly about his own personal life. Both of them are flawed and generous in their different ways, while the rapport between the three of them is similarly elusive. Occasional looks and comments rupture the slightly forced friendliness between them, and between Emily and her father in particular, but they’re quickly and habitually subsumed back into this polite veneer. We glimpse what may be explanations for this distance – at one point the father wields an ax to chop wood with slightly alarming vigour – but they may also be red herrings, or projections of one of the characters, suffused with a significance that has vanished for everyone else involved. In the end, Jeff and Emily leave pretty early, not even staying for dinner, not out of overt animosity, but because there doesn’t seem to be much more that can be said; a couple of hours is enough to exhaust even the politest chitchat.

The second story takes place in Dublin and focuses on a pair of sisters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps), in their annual afternoon tea with their mother (Charlotte Rampling). Even more than in the first story, this trio perpetually resort to the windows of the mother’s palatial house, continually looking outward as they dance dexterously over the substance of their lives. There’s not necessarily trauma or antagonism here so much as a sense that the only thing holding them together is the formality of family, which pairs beautifully with Jarmusch’s consummate late period formalism. Conversation is distilled to an empty vessel, pure transparency, a way to simply “say what you see,” and so here, as in the first story, there’s a dialogic focus on water, the most neutral substance you can possibly discuss: “Does water even have a taste?” “Well of course, it tastes like water.” As conversation dissolves into so much water, it imparts a pristine pellucidity to Jarmusch’s mise-en-scene, right down to the closing pantomime, in which all three women lament having to “leave so soon” before enduring an agonising seven-minute wait for an Uber.

The third story takes place in Paris and departs a little from the first two in presenting us with a pair of twins, Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) who are reuniting to visit their family apartment for the last time following the sudden death of their parents in a light air accident. In both of the first two stories, the crisis epoch of the family has long passed – everyone is now living in the aftermath of “the family” as an experiment, and nowhere is that clearer than when the twins go through their parents’ possessions, questioning “Did we ever know why they were doing anything, anywhere?” Even as they lean against each other on the floor of the apartment, wanting to stay there forever, the landlady enters to reveal that not only does the property no longer belong to them but their parents were three months behind on rent. Even as the family recedes, then, the twins remain trapped in it as a sequestered world where time doesn’t flow; it feels right that the skateboarders appear at the very start of this story, a reminder of regular time and space passing just out of reach.

While the focus of all three stories is undeniably family, they exude a quiet profundity that goes beyond family to meditate on the closeness and distance that mediates all our relationships with other people. As you get older, it’s not uncommon to find that people you were once around all the time, without any filter or threshold, have suddenly (or gradually) become concealed behind intermittent and curated encounters. One of the most enduring elements of the film, then, is the way these family members remain mysterious to each other – and especially how the parents remain mysterious to their children. No sooner do Jeff and Emily depart from their father’s house than he changes the furniture, sheds his geriatric lassitude and rings a local date to suggest that go out for dinner on the money that Jeff left for expenses. Timothea and Lilth’s mother is a bestselling novelist but as they remind each other, when they come across a box of her books, she refuses to share this part of her live with them. Most dramatically, Skye and Billy concede, after learning that their parents’ marriage certificate was fake, that they know almost nothing about them. And that mysterious combination of closeness and distance finally feels part of the broader elegy for cinema that we see pervading Jarmusch’s late work, for what is cinema but a confounding of who is close to us and who is very far away from us? Hence the grainy celluloid flickers that separate each story and the Anika song “Spooky” that opens and closes this beautiful and understated film, its lyrics by Jarmusch: “In the cool of the evening/When everything is getting groovy/You call me up and ask me/Would I like to go with you and see a movie…”