Captured in sun-drenched, finely framed images, this house superficially looks like the perfect place for a small family utopia. The rooms are bright and beautiful with large windows, some of which function as doors. Butterflies dance in the garden, which borders on a forest, and fireflies dance in the darkness. The swimming lake is not far either. But appearances are deceptive, because even if nothing is one-dimensional here, as never before in the stubborn cinematography of the Swiss twin brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher: what lurks beneath the surface and is revealed layer by layer is something special. With “The Sparrow in the Chimney” the Zurichers conclude their animal trilogy and take their cinema of productive opposites to the extreme.
A family runs, shuffles and scratches through the idyll. Karen (Maren Eggert), in whose parents’ house we are, maneuvers through the house with coldness and poisonous tips towards everyone. Her husband Markus (Andreas Döhler) looks like a street dog, is affectionate with the children and, without hiding it much from his wife, has an affair with neighbor Liv (Luise Heyer). Teenage daughter Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss) rebels, smokes and acts sexually precocious. And her brother Leon (Ilja Bultmann), a victim of bullying at school, cooks and bakes constantly.
Verbal malice in high frequency
The family is particularly excited because Markus’ birthday is to be celebrated in the garden and Karen’s sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) has come to visit for the occasion with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy), their daughter and their newborn. Karen and Markus’ eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) has also announced their arrival. In “Spatz”, in which Ramon filmed his script and Silvan Zürcher took over the production, the brothers also show a family between the everyday and the exceptional. Her mode has always been as peculiar as it is unique, a poetic look at human existence domesticated by familial and social norms.
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The acclaimed debut “The Strange Kitten” followed the gathering of a confusingly large and motley family. While the titular kitten licks milk from a glass, various interpersonal dynamics that are characterized by more than latent violence are revealed. “The Girl and the Spider” then used a move to tell the story of the anything but easy separation between two friends and spanned a complex web between the family members and friends. “Sparrow” manifests even more clearly what has always characterized the brothers’ films: their removal of the supposedly banal through modern poetic realism. In “Spatz” the theme of liberation is metaphorically charged and at the same time radically made concrete.
Many in the family, some more, some less, are prisoners of current or past developments. This is expressed superficially in verbal malice, which is delivered at high frequency and more explicitly than in the previous films. Rowdy Karen gives her children every reason to hate her and “reaps” the rewards. “Do that again and I’ll burn down your wardrobe,” threatens Johanna because her mother made a hole in one of her tops. There are no taboos in the language, people call themselves disturbed or invent stories about dead twins who have been cut out and who, because they ended up in the trash, were at least spared the house and their mother Karen.
Horror that flirts with the absurd
Beneath the picturesque images lurks a horror populated by people and animals that also flirts with the absurd, in which love and (verbal) transgressions are close together and, for sublimation, a hand is sometimes scalded in the stew or the cat is put in the washing machine. With the moment when, in addition to the immediate nastiness, what happened here in Karen and Jules’ childhood becomes apparent, the surreal increasingly hijacks the narrative. In a furious sequence, the inside tips completely outwards: someone rasps their hand up to the wrist on the vegetable grater, and for Karen the world is on fire.
In “The Sparrow in the Chimney”, Ramon Zürcher marries Ingmar Bergman with David Lynch to create a profound and entertaining psychogram of a family, but above all of a woman, in whom transgenerational traumas and longings have been inscribed. If you want to be free like the sparrow that actually comes shooting out of the dusty chimney, you have to do something about it. “Until then, I won’t allow any restraints, not a single one!”, says Johanna, whose joints are becoming increasingly stiff due to illness, at one point – an apt imperative for this gripping cinematic unleashing.
