In a remote but spacious ancestral home, where Karen (Maren Eggert) lives with her husband and children, preparations are afoot for an extravagant birthday celebration. As the house starts to fill up, however, tensions mount, and the space becomes a veritable pressure cooker of longstanding familial strife. As animals of all sorts roam freely through the airy domestic space, the location becomes the locus of sundry overlapping dramas. It is only a matter of time before the fires start burning.

The third and final installment of Ramon Zürcher’s “animal trilogy,” following 2013’s The Strange Little Cat and 2021’s The Girl and the Spider (both co-directed with Silvan Zürcher), The Sparrow in the Chimney finds the filmmaker perfecting his signature aesthetic. Character interactions are at once psychologically grounded and quirkily exaggerated; edits are deployed for maximum spatial disruption; surreal comic interludes bleed into quotidian reality. An entropic symphony of domestic existence, it is a film whose luminous surfaces yield only deeper enigmas.

Country of Origin: Switzerland
Language: In German with English subtitles

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