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Family Portrait Captures an Uneasy Dynamic

Photo: courtesy Factory 25.

Lucy Kerr’s debut feature film Family Portrait captures a moment in time as a sprawling extended family plans a group picture for their matriarch’s annual Christmas card. It’s a familiar familial exercise, a bit of orchestrated performance, a celebratory ritual for some, sure to cause anxiety for others. As carefully conceived, brilliantly acted, precisely executed as Family Portrait is, for any literal-minded viewers who would like to know “what happens” in films they watch, it is also maddeningly oblique. Its narrative is cryptic by design in a film that aims to explore the anxieties inherent in the preparations and posing for the annual portrait, an exercise that tends to mask and suppress tensions.

Kerr’s film achingly depicts one family member in particular’s increasing anxiety as the family assembles and those tensions mount. It just doesn’t quite ever let one know the consequence of those tensions, as the plot, rather than follow through with the narrative it establishes, takes viewers into a metaphysical realm, one hinted at by its enigmatic opening scene. As Family Portrait begins, we see family members—sons, daughters, spouses, children, pets—loosely flitting their way through a park towards an unseen destination. One in particular, a young woman in her twenties, seems intent on dragging the others along, though her attempts to do so are less than entirely successful. The sound design begins with near silence, then a muted, echoing cacophony, as if the actions were being witnessed from underwater, until it slowly dissolves into a more natural soundscape as the group slowly assembles toward their destination: the family portrait.

The picture doesn’t get taken at that moment, though, as from there Family Portrait flashes back to earlier that morning. One of four daughters, Katy (Deragh Campbell), the woman who earlier had been seemingly pulling the others toward their destination, is awoken from a late and fitful sleep by her Polish boyfriend Oleg (Chris Galust). Katy is introverted, her actions measured, especially in comparison to her confident, ebullient mother (Silvana Bakich), who is orchestrating the family breakfast and the annual photo, to be taken by Oleg. On the surface, the gathering of the extended family for a holiday weekend feels as benign as any: it’s filled with children playing, adults reminiscing, preparing meals, and playing games. But all of it, especially the perceived pressure of the planned portrait, seems to weigh heavily on Katy.

Deragh Campbell as Katy, her hair and shirt wet, standing in front of a river.
Deragh Campbell as Katy in Family Portrait. Photo: courtesy Factory 25.

As the morning progresses and the portrait nears, Kerr follows family members through several conversations that hint at the film’s intentions. Katy’s father tells a story about a photograph in which his father, a WWII veteran, was later altered and made famous as a Vietnam memento—suggesting that photographs can mask or alter truths as much as reveal them. Katy’s mother learns that a cousin, a 21-year-old college student, has died, suddenly, of a mysterious lung infection: the father, who seems a bit prone to conspiracy theories (and who saw his own father’s service distorted in the name of propaganda), conjectures about how she might have contracted the infection. It’s the dawn of Covid, and families like Katy’s scarcely know how illness, death, disinformation, and conspiracy will begin to tear at the fabric that holds them together.

With each passing hour, Katy frets more and more about the portrait, to the point where she can’t really even process any other conversation. Hers is not an entirely rational worry, but anxiety rarely is. No one else shares her concern: to them, the weekend is more about play and leisure than assembling for a photo. Presented largely from Katy’s perspective, Family Portrait is really more about Katy’s increasing anxiety than the photograph itself: she feels all the pressure to make the portrait happen but can’t share in any of the joyous reunion it’s meant to commemorate. Campbell is riveting in her performance as a young woman whose anxieties are exacerbated by the gathering and by the felt pressure of familial responsibility.

Family portraits are, as Roland Barthes noted (and according to the director-writer in the film’s press notes), attempts to freeze a moment in time and immortalize the family, even though their production is an exercise in anxiety. (The film itself never alludes to Barthes directly, but one can imagine Katy or Olek having read his Camera Lucida, in which he argues that photos, in their attempt to “rescue” a moment in time from its passage, do the opposite: they signal the very death they hope to forestall.) Katy’s family is one that, even while they seem cordial and pleasant on the surface, is starting to grieve the loss of a loved one and is facing an especially uncertain future. One wonders if Katy’s anxiety is more about whether what the portrait might portend than whether it can be executed successfully.

Kerr’s film is not especially interested in resolving the conflicts it establishes. Instead, it is itself its own moving portrait of a family in tradition and transition, attentive to preserving rituals and passing them on from one generation to the next, even if that family is disquietingly inattentive to the private pain one of its members is suffering. Family Portrait doesn’t conclude in any traditional sense, instead taking viewers into some strange realm outside the fact of physical reality; in doing so, it is certain to frustrate viewers looking for the simple clarity of, say, a still photograph. But it’s also going to present a “family portrait” of a very different sense, one that may linger even longer than the one Katy’s family had planned.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies at Winona (MN) State University. Since retiring in 2021 he publishes Film Obsessive, where he reviews new releases, writes retrospectives, interviews up-and-coming filmmakers, and oversees the site's staff of 25 writers and editors. His film scholarship appears in Women in the Western, Return of the Western (both Edinburgh UP), and Literature/Film Quarterly. An avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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