The Sparrow in the Chimney

Ramon Zürcher · 2024 · 117 minutes
April 16 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 p.m.

“Less elusive and more heated than their first two features, this darkly engrossing psychodrama of pent-up domestic tensions should be an arthouse breakthrough for Switzerland’s gifted Zürcher brothers.” – Variety

“A film dipped in venom, often funny and deeply unsettling in how it portrays families who don’t feel the need to hide their vitriol behind pleasantries.” – RogerEbert.com

Karen lives with her husband Markus and their children in her idyllic childhood home. Karen’s sister Jule and her family are visiting for Markus’ birthday. The two women could not be more different. Grim reminders of their deceased mother incite Jule’s rebellion against her domineering sister. As the house gradually fills with life and a sparrow in the chimney seeks a way out to freedom, Karen becomes increasingly tense — until it all comes to a head and the old is destroyed to make room for the new.

Programmer’s Note

The Public Cinema was launched on February 8, 2015 at the Knoxville Museum of Art with a screening of The Strange Little Cat, the debut feature by Ramon Zürcher. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of that event, we’re kicking off Film Fest Knox’s 2025 free screening series with Zürcher’s latest, The Sparrow in the Chimney.

Ramon Zürcher, in collaboration with his identical twin brother, Silvan, makes movies that aren’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. On the surface, they appear to be everyday middlebrow family dramas. All three — The Sparrow in the Chimney is the final film in a trilogy of sorts — take place in a confined space, during a period of one or two days when family members, friends, and strangers are trapped (for lack of a better word) in close proximity to one another.

In both The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider (2021), there are unexpressed and troubling tensions running just beneath the polite surface. (It’s totally fair to speculate on the Zürcher brothers’ mommy issues, I think.) In The Sparrow in the Chimney, all of that subtext becomes text, and as a result the film veers more explicitly into horror terrain. Fair warning: there are a couple disturbing moments in this film, but they’re more psychologically intense than graphic.

The severity of the Zürchers style is leavened by their deep fondness for, and curiosity about, these characters who have been dropped into a meticulously choreographed and fantastical world. For the cinephile crowd among us, I’d put the Zürchers somewhere in a Venn diagram with the all-things-go surrealism of Luis Buñuel, the surgeon-like inquisitiveness of Ingmar Bergman, and the stern precision of Michael Haneke. The Zürchers are, for me, the most exciting narrative filmmakers of their generation. — Darren Hughes