‘Family Portrait’ Review – Reality Falls To Pieces In Lucy Kerr’s Cryptic Debut

Everyone knows the struggle: Corralling the family for a photo to commemorate a weekend, a moment, or just because you need a new photo. A trying task in trying times, it often proves impossible, especially when kids are involved. In spite of her best efforts, Katy (Deragh Campbell) can’t manage to get everyone in the same frame long enough for her camera’s automatic timer to perform its simple duty, to capture a fleeting moment that should last a lifetime. Everyone is in the same area but seems incapable of making their way to the same place. To quote the Coen Brothers’ Hail Caesar, “Would that it were so simple.”

This controlled chaos unfolds in the opening, wordless scene of Lucy Kerr’s cryptic Family Portrait, where the only sound we hear is the whistling wind. The noise of Katy’s scattered family making their way through the backyard has been drowned out, as if to represent the ideal state of stillness that could be achieved were everything to go as intended. But how can anything go according to plan when nothing in the film is as it seems? Acute and seeping with dread despite entirely taking place in a tranquil location, the titular family’s home in Texas, Kerr’s confident debut is sure never to tip its enigmatic hand even as its clear that something mysterious and unforeseen is bound to occur, and not in the form of a pleasant surprise.

Shot by Lidia Nikonova from an occasionally-still distance that recalls Łukasz Żal’s work on Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, there’s an intimacy to Family Portrait even as much of its contents feel as though they’ve just been removed from the freezer to thaw out. Which is fitting, given the chilling revelations that begin to disrupt the already-turbulent nature to a vacation’s conclusion. Katy and her routine-oriented boyfriend, Olek (Chris Galust), are scheduled to leave at the end of the day, and the delay in the portrait proceedings leads to subdued frustration on his part; though he remains calm, we spend much of the film wondering whether or not he’ll boil over. At one point, news of a step-cousin’s death due to an unnamed virus reaches the family – the film notably takes place days before COVID’s on-set, though it’s only referenced in brief through anecdotes of this sort, as well as passing comments about how unsafe the world is slowly becoming, with hospitals catching strays in particular. 

But the arrival of Family Portrait’s primary disturbance, the fact that Katy’s mother (Silvana Jakich) has suddenly vanished without a trace, sends the film into surrealist territory – nothing is as it seems, something is afoot, et cetera. But the film Kerr has on her hands is hardly one that can be codified beneath the banner of a specific genre. There’s mystery, sure, and it’s all incredibly dramatic, but there’s plenty of horror-adjacent traits to be found here, too. Katy is appropriately alarmed that she can’t find her mother – not least because she was the one who was most passionate about organizing her family’s yearly photograph – yet no one else seems willing to acknowledge it as concerning. 

As Katy traipses around the grounds in search of her mother – finding herself, at one point, wading into a distant creek before returning, drenched, to a recreation of the attempted portrait rodeo where it all began – her sisters (Rachel Alig and Katie Folger), father (Robert Salas), and everyone else who is present fails to register any sort of alarm. What is causing this disarray, this dissolution of reality? Kerr, it seems, would rather we not know, at least not outright. This clever film is the sort that would have its characters whisper to one another, yet never reveal what secrets they exchanged.

At its simplest, Family Portrait is at once a collection of the things we remember fondly from familial rendezvous and a vision of the things we thought we’d forgotten, the harsher moments that should have been lost to time long ago yet remain burbling at the base of our subconscious, waiting eagerly for an opportunity to spill out. It’s quite like a family portrait in that way: While we see smiling faces, the true, often-conflicting emotions that each participant is individually feeling are hidden behind masks. Perhaps there’s nothing more fitting for a film that is quietly hinting at a not-too-distant future in which hiding our faces, our truths, became the new normal.

Family Portrait is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of Factory 25.