Family Portrait

It’s a foreboding film, a drama that recreates the sense that something bad is going to happen or may have happened already.

While free-floating and airy in its construction, the film’s deceiving familiarity slowly erodes, morphing into an unsettling, formally astute brain-tickler

Family Portrait stands out for its profound mistrust, not just of images but of the sense of sight altogether.

Kerr's approach at times feels a bit too distant, but if she aims to be as vague as the emotions you can interpret from a still photograph, then she succeeds.

Quietly disquieting.

Family Portrait is a smart film. The uncertainty of the film’s ending will either resonate with you or it won’t. You’ll fill the emptiness with your experience, or you’ll just leave it hollow. It’s really up to you.

This playful, totally unfettered quality extends to Kerr's morally ambiguous, occasionally discomfiting consideration of the natural landscape that surrounds the family and the effect that it has on their behavior.

Even if the film can’t quite express what it wants to say about the characters on the screen, it does its job using them and the scenery they operate inside as a wide array of canvasses slowly but surely losing color.

Lucy Kerr's stunning feature debut...rapidly but silently dissolves into almost anxiety-inducing levels of understated chaos...The atmosphere of Family Portrait is beautifully stifling.

With a soundtrack that rises and falls in an ambient bolero of distorted machine noise, and acting that can bronze-cast a character with just a glance, it’s the alchemical little movie that could, and one of the year’s best.