Get the latest gossip
‘The Sparrow in the Chimney’ Review: A Heady Summer Bonfire of Combustible Family Relations
An engrossing psychodrama of pent-up domestic tensions, 'The Sparrow in the Chimney' should be an arthouse breakthrough for Ramon and Silvan Zürcher.
Pretty much everyone, it turns out, in Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s elegantly vicious domestic horror movie, which forensically unpicks the compacted resentments, betrayals and traumas underpinning a single weekend family gathering, with a touch as icy as the lighting is consistently, relentlessly warm. Meanwhile, her highschooler daughter Johanna (a scorching Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t touch her mother if her life depended on it: A self-styled Lolita who yearns to escape the nest, she radiates above-it-all hostility toward the world in general, but saves a special white-hot reserve of hatred for Karen. Zürcher’s script balances the excavation of long-buried secrets against a steady stream of present-tense confrontations and revelations, as does his limber, darting editing — while Eggert’s tensely still, hollowed-out performance, as a matriarch increasingly inclined to walk away from familial chaos, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative sturm und drang.
Or read this on Variety