Objects of your affection

Movies talk to each other. What did the films of 2025 have to say? This is a look at how three movies from the past year tackle similar subjects in different ways. Be warned, SPOILERS for Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora follow.

Our stuff isn’t that important, right? Material goods may have physical presence but don’t carry the spiritual weight of what really matters, the intangibles like love and friendship and kindness. And everyone knows that you can’t take your stuff with you when you go. But on the other hand you can’t take love and friendship and kindness either. Objects can last longer than people and communicate meaning long after the people who owned them are gone. And they can communicate meaning when the people who own them are still around but don’t have the words — those intangible, ephemeral things — to express themselves.

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For a spare, cool guy, Jim Jarmusch is attuned to the specificity of things. Blue tip matches, blue suede shoes, black coffee, samurai swords. In The Dead Don’t Die, zombies return to claim their beloved stuff and eat all the hapless townspeople still clinging to their possessions, but in Father Mother Sister Brother he is working in a quieter and less bitter but still melancholy mode. The film’s three segments — a son and daughter visit their father; two daughters visit their mother; a sister and brother visit their newly dead parents’ old apartment — have no familial connections to each other but are linked by visual motifs (like overhead shots of tables) and recurring objects, like water, coffee mugs and Rolexes. All facilitate conversations of varying warmth and affinity, because the other link here is how these families’ links with each other are strained or shattered.

The Father and Mother sections both involve visits that are obligatory and infrequent, neither reveals any deep traumatic break between the parent and children and thus both are ultimately the sadder for this. Sometimes people no longer have much to talk about. Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver do care for their father Tom Waits, with Driver giving him money for groceries and expensive home repairs, and Waits is not unkind to them. They make small talk and reminisce about their deceased mother, with some uncomfortable dancing around Waits’ behavior at her funeral. But what becomes increasingly clear during their gathering is that Waits is not on the up and up here, deflecting detailed inquiries from Bialik and Driver about his life; for their part Bialik and Driver consciously decide not to press further.

The children fulfil their filial duties and when they leave, Waits uncovers his snazzy couch and puts on suave clothes and gets in his perfectly preserved classic car, which has been hidden behind the house that probably didn’t actually need thousands of dollars to repair water damage. He takes the money Driver gave him for groceries and calls up a new squeeze for a fancy meal on the town, a man ready to enjoy his material goods and a life that he conceals from his flesh and blood. Waits is perfectly cast as a disheveled down-and-out blusterer, but here he conveys something more nuanced and canny, that his con is in some fashion a gift. He’s creating a persona that his kids can form belief around, a wino Santa that they can support instead of solicit. He lets them think he needs them so they can still feel like a good son and daughter despite their actual indifference. And if he nets a few extra bucks in the process, no one said love is free.   

Charlotte Rampling’s mother is more openly ambivalent about her offspring — at least she is to her therapist, who she’s conversing with at the start of her segment in a manner far more open and honest than she has with her daughters. Cate Blanchett is the more successful and yet needier elder sibling, Vicky Krieps is the flailing yet flashy younger one (in terms of putting on fronts, she and Tom Waits would have a lot to talk about). But despite their differences, they are united in their apprehensive attitude with their mother, a successful author (a box of her latest novels is set to the side yet clearly present in the house, awaiting comment) who is poised and precise, holding this afternoon tea with her daughters once a year. As much as they may hide it they want her approval, but does she even want a relationship with them?

Like the first segment, the meeting here is based on lies from the start, with Krieps pretending her friend giving her a lift as a favor is an Uber driver. Each person says they are doing well and perhaps they are, but the contours of their lives are buffed and covered, no awkward angles allowed — which just makes the conversation, over tea and special cakes for the occasion, more awkward. Blanchett and Krieps will not disclose any flaws in the facades they present to their mother and while Rampling finds points to press regardless, these are not the malicious machinations of a parent trying to play children off each other. In some ways it’s worse — polite inquiries that are not pursued to uncomfortable places ultimately show that the inquirer doesn’t care that much in the first place. What’s left is ritual and whatever existed before that. While Blanchett and Krieps are poking through their mother’s latest book they also note the many photographs in the home, objects that represent a family as opposed to actions that make one, and one picture shows their younger selves, hand in hand. They unconsciously re-enact this sibling solidarity as they leave their mother’s house as Rampling watches them go and perhaps she is thinking along the same lines as Waits — these people are better relations to each other than children of mine. Some connections are stronger than others.

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Vulcanizadora opens with Joel Potrykus and Joshua Burge striding side by side as heavy metal blasts a hole in the soundtrack, if they are not brothers by birth they are clearly tied to each other in purpose. Which may not be a good thing. As they tramp through the woods Potrykus yammers while Burge mostly glowers, barely tolerating his friend’s bullshit. Potrykus detours to a barely-remembered hidey-hole that contains ancient woods porn, he gets blasted on horrible Jagermeister while listening to Godsmack on a Discman, he watches with appreciation as Burge sets rubber caps ablaze (Burge is actually interested in this part of the trip). These are also objects, totems of a late 90s youth that the mid-40s Potrykus is clinging to with increasingly obvious desperation, trying to find joy in revisiting things that derive their power from the time in which they were found. And Burge knows it can’t be found again. By the campfire the pair finally settle beside, while Potrykus guzzles one of the shittiest boozes known to man and belts out aggro lyrics, Burge tinkers with something half-glimpsed, an unclear and somehow ominous contraption of leather and metal. Another object, but instead of past glories it holds dark potential.

A decade ago, Burge was toiling over another malevolent object, a Nintendo Power Glove with knives attached to the fingers a la Freddy Kruger’s murderous gardening implement. This is the enduring image of Buzzard, the movie that put Potrykus the filmmaker on the map, and while it does not announce itself as such Vulcanizadora is a sequel to that film. There, in the last gasps of early adulthood, Burge was running a series of low-level scams and Potrykus was his loser friend. By Vulcanizadora, Burge is skipping out on parole for arson and Potrykus is a deadbeat dad, a guy with a six-year-old he barely has contact with and the viewer suspects that might be in the kid’s best interest. Not that Potrykus is a bad or abusive guy, but he is so obviously a loser, a whiner, a guy who is never at fault and whose most assertive actions are, well, housing Jagermeister and cranking Godsmack. He has nothing to look forward to and that is why he is out in the woods with Burge, headed for the lake shore where the two will don the facemasks Burge has been crafting and place M-80s in the special slots aligned with their mouths and literally blow their fucking heads off.

As a filmmaker, Jarmusch is not indifferent but he is deadpan and reserved, generally keeping his camera distant so he can show his subjects and their environment — the objects around them — at once. Potrrykus the filmmaker favors close-ups but at a precisely uncomfortable distance, where the frame mostly holds a face but contains just enough space to suggest and then deny a place of escape, like the gap between the bars of a prison cell. When an object appears here — a Discman, a death mask — it is inescapable from the person using it. The double suicide plan requires each person to light the other’s mouth firework and it is largely shot from this unsparing perspective, but within the movie it is also filmed from a distance, with a camcorder the pair plant in the sand to record their final moments. The film’s tight frames show every excruciating moment as Burge and Potrykus talk themselves up and fail to commit, until finally Burge lights his friend’s explosive while Potrykus fails to do so for him. That camcorder films the result. Burge is still alive, despite his plans, and his best friend is dead on the sand. An object to be dealt with.

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The first two segments of Father Mother Sister Brother concern parents interacting with children, in the final section the parents have died and only the children remain. Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play the titular siblings, meeting in Paris to go through what’s left behind after their folks died in a freak airplane crash (the two agree that had their mom piloted instead of their dad, the family unit would still be together). And what is left at their parents’ apartment is an odd mix of cool and phony — an incredibly boss convertible and a genuine Rolex (the watches that appear in the first two segments are likely frauds), multiple fake IDs and a forged marriage certificate. Treasured possessions trumping indicators of identity, and Moore and Sabbat don’t seem troubled by this. The documents are part of a past that isn’t really theirs, that belongs to their parents and the decisions they made. What they have is more solid, including old snapshots of their parents that look achingly like themselves.

And that’s all they have now. Well, that and a storage locker of more stuff that they briefly visit but don’t really go through. This day has been hard enough. Moore and Sabbat have remarkable chemistry with each other, casually intimate in a way that does not suggest anything untoward but feels like an echo of their parents’ relationship in the sense of two people who have spent a lifetime together. The previous segments are full of awkward and oppressive silences, held breaths instead of rests, but Moore and Sabbat can not speak and remain in tune with each other. 

In shock, Burge buries his friend in the sand, takes the envelope Potrykus left for his son, and staggers back to civilization — like all of Potrykus’ films, Vulcanizadora takes place in the Grand Rapids area — but civilization refuses to give him what he wants, which is punishment. The possibility of prison, so oppressive earlier and now a relief to Burge’s guilty conscience, is tossed aside through a loophole. He takes the video that shows Potrykus’ death at his hands to the police and they refuse to watch it, dismissing Burge as a dipshit creep wasting their time. Burge is one of the great actors of the 21st century and here he undoes the resolute facade of the movie’s first half — with intense eyes trapped in a tense face he echoes Buster Keaton, but Keaton’s impassiveness is replaced by a lost neediness that is every bit the equal of Potrykus’ cringey attempts to regain youthful glory. “Men of not only arrested development, but development on death row, awaiting complete annihilation,” Sean Fennell writes in a perceptive review. For a viewer who has watched Burge through the years, it is a shock to see him look older and weathered at the start of Vulcanizadora; but as the movie progresses he looks younger and this is somehow worse. He has gone nowhere and has nowhere to go.

So he goes back to the beach, digging hole after hole to try and find his friend’s body, proof of his guilt and justification for damnation. Before he agreed to die, almost as a condition for agreeing to die, Potrykus finally drops his pose of manic bro-dom and asks if hell is the state of feeling anxiuos and sad for all time. Because that’s clearly where he is in his life and it’s where Burge is now. He falls asleep among his holes and wakes up to a happy family hanging out down the beach, they might as well be aliens. But the young son digging in the sand finds what Burge has been looking for and as that family deals with the horrible intrusion of death, Burge serenely walks into the water and completes the double suicide he planned earlier. Maybe he’s on his way to hell, but it clearly can’t be worse than where he is now, where there is nothing to offer comfort — no fireworks, no creepy mask gear, no aggro CDs, no Jagermeister. Nothing worth holding onto.

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The parents in the final segment of Jarmsuch’s film are absent objects, but they find representation in what they leave behind — items and totems but Moore and Sabbat themselves. And this will come to pass one day for the children of the first two segments as well. Are we watching days that, despite their uncomfortable interactions and resentments, will become memories, mental objects to be pulled out and turned over? My dad has been gone for eight years now and not every memory I have of him is one I would have chosen, but they are what I have. Along with photos and clothes and the old thesaurus I use every time I write. We do not always choose the things we leave behind, and yet they still say things about us. The tension running through Father Mother Sister Brother comes from the gap between what is not said between families and what can no longer be said. Because that gap isn’t there until it is, and there’s no going back.

Before Burge heads to the beach for a final time, he confronts Potrykus’ son (who is played by Potrykus’ son in real life). It is a small masterpiece of ill communication, with Burge trying to expurgate his guilt without hurting the poor kid; he tells the boy his dad has gone to Florida and Burge’s weary yet just-barely-amused-at-his-own-despair acknowledgment that he too is headed to Florida is one of the roughest chuckles I’ve had in a movie. Burge gives the kid that envelope his dad left for him and the final scene of the movie is Potrykus’ son reading his final words: “I did not do anything—this—because of anything that you did.”

But the envelope also contains an object, one that stuck a knife in my heart. Joel Potrykus is five years older than me, so he would have been 12 in 1989, when Upper Deck released its Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card — VJ Lovero’s iconic photo of a 19-year-old Griffey grinning at the camera is promise and potential distilled to an image, a Titian portrait of Slugger with Bat. This immediately became the Holy Grail of baseball card collecting, the card that a kid could theoretically get in a pack and the one that was sure to be worth more than you could imagine by the end of his career. Which was an unfathomable time away, of course. There was no surer bet than an Upper Deck Griffey rookie card, no object more likely for a young person to save for their own future. 

Griffey wound up with a Hall of Fame career and was one of the best players of the 90s, but injuries kept him from becoming the god that everyone thought he would be (although he is now a well-regarded sports photographer himself). That rookie card is still worth a couple hundred bucks but is not — due to the insane economics of the baseball card market more than anything related to Griffey himself — worth the fuck-you money thousands if not millions of kids in the early 90s thought it would be. And seeing it here, as the last and best thing a man has to pass on to his son, is both a recognition of the card’s coolness and a condemnation of a dream that was never grown out of, that was not moved past when life demanded more. It’s an object that speaks of lost potential and it says so much about the man who left it behind.

At least, that’s what I see in it. Who knows what a six-year-old who is maybe just starting to understand his dad will never come back sees? It is an object that was once his father’s and it is now his. Whatever else he chooses to see in it will be his decision alone.