Lucy Kerr’s directorial debut Family Portrait opens with a sequence that leverages the power of cinema as a pure audiovisual storytelling medium. On a lovely, sunlit day by the river, Katie (Anne at 13,000 Ft.’s excellent Deragh Campbell) shepherds her family members into some semblance of a formation, mostly in vain. Kids wander off, their parents and grandparents get distracted and Katie is left alone in the crowd to frustratedly zigzag around them, as if she herself were the matriarch. This closely choreographed chaos, paired with a harsh soundscape that gives off an anxiety-inducing underwater effect, ushers us into an enigmatic story of a family on the brink of unraveling.
Katie’s family is upper-middle class average; hired help aides Katie’s mother (Silvana Jakich) in the kitchen of the cavernous Texas family house, which sits atop a well-kept but sprawling estate. The family photo tradition originated with Katie’s mother, who displays her large red photo album proudly, using it as a guide to show Katie’s photographer boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust) how she wants the photo to look. Olek is a good enough sport, even if he’s a little cranky and anxious to get to the airport on time, but I found him to be the character I identified with most: the Polish guy misunderstood as Russian by Katie’s unwitting American family members, the outsider tasked with documenting another family’s attempt to mask their inner fears. But, bless his heart, he loves Katie, so he’s willing to play along.
Everything seems normal, until a piece of bad news punctures the tranquility: A distant step-cousin, who was young and healthy, recently dropped dead due to “a virus.” Katie’s father (Robert Salas) grumbles about how unsafe hospitals are these days; everyone more or less ignores him. It’s lucky for the filmmakers that Family Portrait so far has not been branded as a “COVID film,” since the film takes place at the dawn of the pandemic. Although it may lack certain COVID-era signifiers like masking, stringent cleaning and social distancing, Family Portrait questions why audiences are so allergic to the idea of re-examining a time in our lives when many people were dying in our midst.
In an ironic twist of fate, Katie’s mother, the one for whom the family portrait is so important, is the one who disappears without a trace. “Where’s mom?” Katie repeatedly asks her sisters (Katie Folger and Rachel Alig), who seem utterly unbothered that their mom is inexplicably nowhere to be found. This is where Family Portrait shifts from realism to surrealism—the figurative becomes literal when Katie’s mom is missing and no one in the family is willing to even acknowledge it.
“You can’t always trust photographs,” Katie’s father says at one point. The patriarch is speaking in reference to an old war photo of Katie’s grandfather that has spiraled far out of its original context, but the statement could also serve as Kerr’s thesis for the film—for all of Katie and her mother’s emphasis on the importance of the family photo, there’s so much more emotional baggage left unpacked. The harder Katie tries to gather her family members together, the more elusive they become, like granules of sand slipping between her fingers.
The overall effect of Family Portrait is the foggy disorientation often experienced after abruptly waking from a strange dream; although Kerr dances around gruesome territory, she never plunges us into a full-blown nightmare. There’s no monster lurking in the shadows, waiting to pick off the family members one by one, no boogeyman under the bed. For Kerr, there’s already enough uneasy terror in the difficult ideas we are unwilling to breach with each other.
Director: Lucy Kerr
Writer: Lucy Kerr
Starring: Deragh Campbell, Chris Galust, Katie Folger, Rachel Alig, Robert Salas, Silvana Jakich
Release Date: June 28, 2024
Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.