Directed by: Lucy Kerr
Distributed by: Factory 25
Written by Michael Clawson
80/100
While most movies about family gatherings center around holidays, “Family Portrait,” as its title suggests, is anchored to a more specific and mundane occasion: the taking of a family photo. The catch is that director Lucy Kerr, here making her directorial debut, is uninterested in the all smiles image that results from this familiar ritual. Instead, Kerr’s tense, formally rigorous film observes a Texas family in the moments just before they’re to take their annual Christmas card photo. Suffused with bone-deep anxiety, this slim but striking feature is less a standard family drama than a low-key, thriller-adjacent exercise in dread.
In a bravura opening sequence, we see Katy (Deragh Campbell, from 2019’s excellent “Anne at 13,000 ft”) eagerly corralling her family towards a sunny riverside for the photo-op. As if it were afloat on water, the camera drifts forwards and backwards as the group slowly progresses; eerily, their voices are muffled beneath a thick layer of white noise. The static gradually quiets so that the overlapping chatter of adults and children can be heard, but the tension, the tingly evocation of something beneath the film’s surface, persists. As the narrative doubles back to earlier in the day day, Kerr drops in on conversations between different family members as they languorously pass the time together. In crisp static shots that come to form a mosaic, husbands watch football together, wives chat in lawn chairs outside, and kids freely run around in the grass. At one point, in a beat swiped from “L’Avventura,” Katy’s mother mysteriously vanishes, causing Katy to frantically search the woodsy terrain of the family’s sprawling Southern home in growing distress.
With the matriarch’s disappearance, the film takes a turn towards the surreal, and the sense of immersion in a muggy dreamscape becomes more heightened. While it’s by no means a fatal development, I prefer the film’s tactics before that point, when Kerr more subtly conjures the unease that’s troubling her characters at a seemingly subterranean depth. One conversation in particular establishes that the story is unfolding at a precise moment in recent history: the family gets word that a relative just passed away from some ill-defined sickness, hinting that “Family Portrait” is set at the precipice of the pandemic. But if this is a COVID movie, it’s one in mood more so than story. Rather than the literal threat of contamination, “Family Portrait” disquiets through more ambiguous gestures, be it a shot of rustling, sun-dappled trees, or an insect crawling through the grass.
“Family Portrait” Trailer
Michael Clawson is a member of the Seattle Film Critic Society you can follow his passion for film on Letterboxd.