The opening frame of “The Bird in the Chimney” conjures up a kind of art-oriented ideal of country life: In a spacious, rustic-textured farmhouse kitchen, mid-afternoon sunlight streams in through open windows so large they function as French doors, looking out onto rolling, summer-kissed meadows and the misty woods beyond. A regal orange cat slinks over the windowsill, while the singing of birds and the chatter of amplified insects also seem to blur the boundaries of inside and outside. A casserole simmers patiently on the stove. Who wouldn’t want to live like that? It turns out that almost everyone does, in Ramon and Sylvain Zurcher’s elegantly sinister home horror, which criminally unpacks the repressed resentments, betrayals, and traumas that underpin a single family weekend gathering, with a touch as icy as the constantly warm, relentless lighting.
The Zürcher twins—who receive joint “film from” credit for all their work, though only Ramon is credited here as writer, director, and editor, with Sylvain as producer—are adept at exploring quaint domestic spaces in a way that makes them unfamiliar, even bizarre. Their first film, 2013’s The Curious Little Kitten, observed the daily routine of an ordinary family from a distance, turning their movements into hilarious physical comedy, while 2021’s The Girl and the Spiders mapped out the whispers of strangeness in the comings and goings of a young woman’s move to a new apartment. The third film in Zürcher’s “animal trilogy,” The Bird and the Chimney, combines the same quality of detached observation and imaginative sense of the absurd into a more detailed narrative, sparkling with melodramatic menace and emotional intensity. This heightened dramatic heft could give this Locarno entry a chance at a wider arthouse coverage that has eluded the Zürchers’ previous works, despite their enthusiastic critical following.
The “animal” aspect of the trilogy is not incidental. Throughout The Bird and the Chimney , the natural world encroaches on human life in ways that feel less aggressive than equal, as social norms and restraints are gradually discarded in favor of primal, savage instincts. The first innocuous sign of this collapse is, well, a bird that has fallen into the fireplace of the sprawling country house where Karen (Maren Eggert, “I’m Your Man”) grew up and is now raising her steadily estranged family. The bird is freed, in a dust storm, by Karen’s only preteen son, Leon (Ilya Bultmann); over the next two hours, few people will escape with such good fortune.
Karen’s ever-stiffening, brooding expression is the first clue that all is not rosy in this seemingly pastoral setting. When her younger, more cheerful sister Jules (Britta Hamelstein) arrives for the weekend, with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzaoui) and daughter Ida (Luana Greco) nearby, Karen has to embrace her, as if her body has forgotten how to do so. When Karen’s eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) also joins them from college, there is an anxious void where a hug should be. Meanwhile, her daughter Johanna (a searing Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t touch her mother even if her life depended on it: Lolita, who calls herself Lolita and longs to escape the nest, radiates a deep hostility toward the world in general, but she also maintains a private reserve of white hatred for Karen. This begins to affect the angelic Leon, a skilled gourmet (and a vulnerable target for local bullies) who cooks the family's meals but doesn't eat them.
The occasion for this family gathering is the birthday of Karin’s husband, Markus (Andreas Dohler), though he’s not in the mood to celebrate either—he’d rather quietly continue his courtship of the family dog walker Liv (Louise Heyer), who lives in a cottage across the road and has an alleged history of mental illness and arson. Thus, all the elements are in place for a quasi-Chekhovian duel between competing desires and misery, though not every conflict plays out exactly as you might expect: some aggrieved characters watch passively when you expect them to attack, while others resort to blatant violence without apparent provocation. Meanwhile, the most aggressive presence here may be that of a ghost: Karin and Jules’s dead mother, whom the sisters remember somewhat differently, and who continues to exert control over a home to which Karin feels oppressively bound, while Jules is only too happy to wash her hands of it.
Zürcher's script balances the excavation of long-buried secrets with a steady stream of present-day encounters and revelations, as does his fluid, snappy editing—while Eggert's quiet, tense performance, as a mother increasingly drawn away from the family chaos, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative. Storm and cloudsThe rest of the ensemble plays brilliantly to the film’s volatile tonal shifts. There’s more broad-based, biting comedy in their group interactions, and occasional devastating tenderness when they find themselves alone—as in one wonderful scene where Christina, despite her recent absence, reads her younger brother’s inner life with such intensity that he feels, at least for a moment, less alone in this life.
The Bird in the Chimney may be a busy, nervously energetic affair, but there’s a tension between the gritty drama and the mastery of filmmaking. The characters seem genuinely irritated by the quiet, beautiful compositions of cinematographer Alex Haskerl, and they sometimes struggle to be heard over the complex sound design, a symphonic mix of human rhubarb, humming traffic, and outdoor weather. Nearby, fearsome cormorants have taken over a lake and island where Karen’s children once swam, guarding a space they’re no longer willing to share; perhaps it’s time for this frantic, broken home to surrender itself to the elements.
