Director: Ramon Zürcher
Writer: Ramon Zürcher
Stars: Maren Eggert, Britta Hammelstein, Luise Heyer
Synopsis: The stark personality differences between sisters Karen and Jule become apparent as their families come together for a birthday party.
In a bucolic and picturesque field in Switzerland stands a haunted house. The ghost inhabiting it is a mother and she’s alive. Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney is a tale of generational dysfunction and questions Leo Tolstoy’s maxim that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Karen (Maren Eggert) appears to be the locus of unhappiness in her family, just as her mother before her was. When Karen moved her family into her now-deceased mother’s home she put herself, and them, in a beautifully situated site of depression, withdrawal, and resentment. “I sometimes feel lost in her,” Karen tells her younger sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) “I don’t know where I have gone.”
It’s Karen’s husband Markus’ (Andreas Döhler) birthday and the celebration brings Jule, her husband Jurek (Milian Zurzaway), her young daughter Edda (Luana Greco), and baby Leni with her. As much as their presence is a needed distraction for Markus and Karen’s two children who live with them: young and shy Leon (Ilja Bultmann) and firebrand Johanna (Lea Zoe Voss), the gathering reveals how broken Karen’s relationship with her family has become. With her eldest daughter, Christina (Paula Schindler), flying to the house and the neighbor, Liv (Luise Heyer), vying to replace Karen as matriarch – the house becomes an emotional tinderbox filled with justified resentment and no-holds-barred anger.
The shift from warm and inviting, a sunlight kitchen where Leon is preparing a roast, to foreboding comes in through the mid-afternoon awakening of Karen. The family dog is barking and Leon trepidatiously opens the door to his mother’s room (his father has been banished to the cellar for “snoring”). Karen barely speaks and seems to drift like a dark cloud into the house. A sparrow is indeed caught in the chimney and, in releasing it, Leon’s shirt is made dirty. Later, Karen scolds him for it and deliberately pulls out a shirt he doesn’t want to wear and forces it on him. Although she seems to have a pane of glass between herself and her family, Karen occasionally does knock at it, mostly to enact a small unkindness.
Johanna openly hates her mother. Their first interaction is her arriving home from school. “You’re late,” Karen notes. “You’re insane,” Johanna retorts. There is limited sympathy from Karen that her daughter is suffering from a degenerative disease which will one day leave her motionless. During a particularly heated argument where Karen reaches out to strike her, she says, “Don’t think I’ll spare you just because you’re crippled.” Johanna responds, “Don’t think I’ll love you just because you’re my mother.” Later, Leon echoes Johanna’s anger and tells Karen, “I hate you, and I wish you were dead.” Even Christina, the preferred (by Karen) daughter, admits that she can’t stay for long in the house. She thinks of her siblings and father all the time, but those thoughts lead to her recalling Karen sitting alone, away from them all. She left the house to forget that aspect of her memory and being there reinforces the withholding distance between them that Karen can’t take back. Markus has been pushed so far away from Karen that his affair with the possible arsonist and former biologist Liv doesn’t so much seem like infidelity as it does a way for him to survive.
Adding a party to this familial maelstrom where Jule’s current happiness with her family contrasts with the misery inherent in the house pulls Karen’s rigid coldness into sharp contrast. It’s Jule who gives Johanna the history of her grandparents (an affair conducted by the grandmother, a tragic end for her grandfather) and her frankness in explaining how much she too hated her mother emboldens Johanna and Leon’s destructive behavior. The place is poisoned by history, and, like an island in a pond nearby, crowded with screeching cormorants (metaphorical in the home, literal on the island) who have claimed the space leaving no room for anyone to rest safely.
Zürcher blends the all-too-real tensions of a family dealing with a matriarch’s depression and coldness with a disturbing surreality. As it stands, the house is a magnet for budding sociopathy and unremitting antipathy. Karen deliberately burns her hand in one of Leon’s dishes simply to feel something. Liv likens herself to a firefly (the garden is lit with them) who is poised to poison the slower insects – in this case, Karen. Johanna aggressively flirts with her uncle. Leon, who is the victim of bullying, in turn victimizes something smaller than him. Karen and Jule turn on each other with the latter calling the former a vicious monster. A gloriously festooned garden filled with cheer, false and real, doesn’t gloss over the rot. Yet within this deep malice-bound space Zürcher and Karen see an extreme solution.
The Sparrow in the Chimney is a forensically observed and impeccably acted psychological drama of generational unhappiness. Maren Eggert’s near expressionless face is perfect for Karen’s intentional isolation from those she should love and who should love her. It’s a bravura performance which is complemented by child actor Ilja Bultmann as Leon descending into a darkness at odds with his age, and Lea Zoe Voss’ agent of desperate chaos, Johanna. The audience is situated in the suffocating bitterness and sharp (sometimes hilarious) extremes of behavior in a family lost to disappointment and disgust. An intelligent and scathing film which offers redemption in a fiery dreamlike manner because for this family only scorched earth can meet scorched earth. The Sparrow in the Chimney is a dark, disturbing, and vicious portrait of a family that needs to reset to survive. To leave behind the haunted house and let the past with its tendrils suffocate the present to sink into oblivion.
