‘Jimpa’: Sundance Review

Dir: Sophie Hyde. Australia/Netherlands. 2025. 124mins 

In Jimpa, a filmmaker should reconcile her emotions about her homosexual father — a passionate, larger-than-life determine who hasn’t at all times been straightforward to like. For Good Luck To You, Leo Grande director Sophie Hyde, who co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Cormack, the story attracts from a really private place, and the tenderness she feels towards her three generations of characters shines by means of. Led by layered performances from Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, Hyde’s fifth characteristic is an affectionate, perceptive commentary in regards to the quiet difficulties of household, even when the image overstays its welcome with a melodramatic, predictable remaining third.

Affectionate, perceptive, even when it overstays its welcome 

That is Hyde’s fourth movie to premiere at Sundance, the place its star solid ought to make Jimpa a pretty prospect for patrons. The script’s articulate encapsulation of the struggles of trans and homosexual characters, irrespective of their age, ought to assist business prospects.

Colman performs Hannah, an Australian director placing collectively her new movie: a narrative a couple of lady whose mother and father divorced, partially, as a result of her father got here out as homosexual. As we shortly be taught, Hannah has primarily based the plot on her personal childhood, when her dad Jim (Lithgow) moved to Amsterdam to be his genuine self. Hannah is elevating the nonbinary 16-year-old Frances (Hyde’s personal baby Aud Mason-Hyde) along with her candy however ineffectual husband Harry (Daniel Henshall), and plans a long-overdue household journey to see Jim.

When Frances informs their mother and father that they need to transfer to Amsterdam completely to dwell with their beloved grandfather. Hannah has extreme misgivings however, figures that her troublesome dad will show himself to be such a self-absorbed handful that Frances will realise it’s a nasty thought.

Devoted to Hyde’s late father, Jimpa was impressed by features of the director’s life, though the story and characters have been fictionalised. In its early stretches, this mild, emotionally candid story exudes a welcome messiness as Hyde presents Hannah, Frances and Jim as difficult, bighearted people who care about each other, even when they often have main conflicts. Hannah desires her out-and-proud baby to be comfortable, however she fears that Frances is just too younger to be leaving small-town Adelaide to maneuver to Amsterdam. (Moreover, whereas Frances worships their vibrant homosexual grandfather Jim — who prefers being known as ‘Jimpa’ to ‘Grandpa’ — she is aware of that he’s simpler to like from a distance than in particular person.) Jimpa options no villains, poignantly conscious that every one households include complementary but additionally contradictory personalities.

The three leads all give touching performances accented by the screenplay’s initially delicate brushstrokes. Colman performs a pissed off director who can’t get financiers or potential solid members to know the nuances of why she desires to make a movie, as Hannah continually places it, about “kindness, not battle.” However as Jimpa goes alongside, we perceive how Hannah has averted confrontation in her personal life – a stance that shall be challenged as soon as she faces the prospect of shedding younger Frances to the broader world.

Lithgow maybe has the trickiest task as Jim, an outspoken LGBTQIA+ activist who couldn’t be extra charming — but additionally tends towards self-righteousness and insensitivity. For all of Jim’s speak in regards to the oppression he confronted as a homosexual man through the AIDS epidemic, he might be fast to misgender his grandchild, making snide jokes about pronouns. (In a single painful scene, Jim mocks the very chance that Frances could possibly be bisexual, insisting that there’s no such factor.) Lithgow conveys what’s each interesting and exasperating about this gregarious man who has by no means believed in monogamy and is coming into his twilight years alone.

Due to the movie’s generosity towards its imperfect characters, one desires to be affected person with Jimpa’s late twist, which sends the story in a mawkish route. Hyde has actually constructed up sufficient viewers goodwill that we’re invested in what occurs to the characters — together with Mason-Hyde’s impressionable Frances, who’s hungry to search out their tribe and likewise perhaps even love — however the plotting grows extra acquainted and manipulative. What was as soon as sharp and perceptive turns into muddled and repetitive. Hyde is so near this household that she has hassle letting them go.