There’s something electrifying about watching a filmmaker break free from well-worn formulas and push themselves into new, uncharted territory. The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zürcher’s third feature, is the final installment in a trilogy of highly flammable chamber dramas. Anyone familiar with the previous two, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat and 2021’s The Girl and the Spider––the latter written and directed with twin brother Silvan, who’s produced all his sibling’s projects––will likely remember the clash between their austere mise-en-scène and the tempestuous conflicts that coursed through them. Captured in largely static shots among contained locales (an apartment, a house) and timeframes (Cat spanned a day, Spider two), the films suggest exercises in geometry whose immaculate compositions are always on the verge of collapsing. Pushing against their steely facades are family feuds, acts of wanton cruelty, and violence; watching them, the tension at times is so unbearable you’re left crouching in anticipation for the frame to burst.
But these portraits of dysfunctional families also radiate something else: a keen eye for the surreal and the oneiric. The titular feline in The Strange Little Cat isn’t strange at all, but the film itself is, mining the mundanity of a middle-class family for moments of wonder and folly. Objects and people routinely rebel against the Zürchers’ formalism: a glass bottle spinning on the stove; a ball flying through the kitchen window; buttons popping off of shirts; not to mention the family members themselves and the unsettling anecdotes they relay at each other in a flat-affect tone, as if none of them were really there, were really present––whatever “there” and “present” could possibly mean. So it is for Spider, in which a couple of friends and former roommates part ways once one of them moves into a new space, a process that’s constantly derailed by odd exchanges and detours. Some of these feel cribbed straight out of a fairy tale: an elderly woman who shows up like a witch in the middle of a summer storm, a downstairs neighbor who only crawls out of his flat at night. Both features unfurl in a gossamer of uncanny details that frustrate all causal explanations; as a character muses in Spider, it’s “as if a secret force were holding everything together.”
Cat and Spider both poked at that invisible, dreamlike force, but never fully surrendered to it, which gave way to a peculiar edge-of-the-cliff feeling, as if the films were constantly threatening to venture into a different reality altogether but never fully managed. This is what, in my book, makes the Zürchers’ cinema so gripping, and why The Sparrow in the Chimney feels so exhilarating.
In its most basic terms, the film concerns Karen (Maren Eggert), a middle-aged mother of three who watches her life unravel over a weekend family reunion at her countryside home. So far so Zürchers, and indeed Sparrow begins by ticking all the siblings’ tropes. There are internecine frictions between relatives, blithe micro and macro aggressions, and pets observing the action like wary sentinels. Yet this is also the story of a liberation. Firmly rooted in the perspective of its lead character – to a degree the more choral Cat and Spider arguably were not – Sparrow follows Karen as she struggles to navigate her role in a family from which she’s grown distant, almost indifferent. Everything about her suggests resentment. Shortly after her mother died, Karen moved with husband and kids back to her old childhood farmhouse where much of Sparrow unfolds, a beautiful cottage still haunted by some traumatic childhood memories. She married a man who’s now cheating on her with the next-door neighbor; spiteful and misanthropic (“a world without people,” she hisses at some point, “that would be paradise”) she has resigned to a life whose default emotion is one of bilious anger, nowhere more ferocious than in her fights with teenage daughter Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss).
Yet Sparrow works against that. As the family gathering moves toward its climax, Karen slowly opens up to the energies floating around her––which is to say she rouses from her emotional torpor, the film itself awakening with her. Shot by Alex Hasskerl, who’d also lensed Cat and Spider, there are sequences in Sparrow that subvert the siblings’ traditional visual grammar. Initially static, the camerawork becomes more sinuous, as if adjusting to Karen’s looser grip on reality; after almost an hour and half spent watching her through largely locked-in medium shots, the Steadicam sequences that follow her through the house towards the end are nothing short of liberating. Appreciation for her journey will depend on how long you can stomach a figure who’s almost comically unlikeable––the kind of grouch so devoid of empathy she often stares at her children as if they were members of an alien species. But the rewards are plenty. Sparrow is a final chapter that retroactively sheds light on its predecessors, grafting their flair for the fantastical onto a story that’s not afraid to explore that vein to its extremes until the film swells into a dream, the psychodrama into a horror. Ghosts appear; identities swap; the border between what’s real and what isn’t becomes porous.
There’s no denying the stiffness of some of the most overtly symbolic images, like the recurrent view of a putrid island infested with cormorants at the center of an otherwise-idyllic nearby lake, the rotten core in Karen’s ostensibly pristine life. But there’s something so sincere about the Zürchers’ approach that makes even the most hamfisted flourishes imply the expressions of a fully uncensored, unbridled vision. With its deep, bold dives into the nightmarish and the surreal, The Sparrow in the Chimney is that rare film that feels like a catharsis for protagonist and director both.
The Sparrow in the Chimney premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.