FAMILIAR | Omeleto
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FAMILIAR | Omeleto
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Two siblings clash.
Margaret and Maurice are sister and brother, and both are sharing Margaret's quarters, which she lives in as part of her job as a groundskeeper of a stately, elegant home and estate. She tends the lawns and gardens, as well as the bird feeders and birdhouses, and regularly culls sparrows from them, an invasive species.
Margaret and her brother are very different; she's earthy and no-nonsense, he's accomplished, cultured and self-consciously sophisticated. Cramped in her small living space, he wants to enjoy the owners' home while they're gone, something Margaret forbids. As the pair vie for control, a mysterious cat appears that seems to have its own allegiances, which may tip the balance of power.
Directed and written by Rebecca Mlinek, this disquieting suspense drama charts the power struggle between a sister and brother who are living too close for comfort. Margaret's small room on the grounds where she works is cozy, homespun and charmingly ramshackle, but its charms sour with the presence of her brother Maurice, who peevishly makes his disdain, opinions and judgments known without hesitation. Rendered in intimate, unadorned and earthbound visuals and embellished with a musical score that can veer from pastoral to eerie, it creates an eccentric, almost hermetic world between the siblings that grows in tension and uncanniness until a small but potent power ruptures it.
The storytelling takes time at first to establish the siblings and their differences, conveyed deftly in the dialogue, which intriguingly conveys an old-fashioned New England provenance, both mannered and salt-of-the-earth. How it lands depends on the character: Margaret has a kind of bluestocking, independent toughness, while Maurice is self-consciously erudite but pretentious. They bicker over everything, from how he wants to enjoy the rest of the house to how Margaret kills sparrows as part of her job. They're getting on one another's nerves, which finds Margaret retreating into her often idyllic outdoor work. Then she encounters a mysterious cat that becomes her companion.
As Margaret and Maurice, actors Claire Schoonover and Michael Gabel convey both the long-running relationship of siblings with history between them and the very different temperaments of their individual characters. The dynamic between them can be affectionate and tolerant, but more often than not, it contains seeds of passive aggression. As they wrangle, a power struggle emerges, and when Maurice directly disobeys Margaret's rule about the house, her anger and resentment come to a head, only to be resolved unexpectedly.
Compact, down-to-earth and yet with a tinge of the fairytale-like, FAMILIAR can essentially be encapsulated as a battle over boundaries and respect. With its unvarnished style, its insistence on compellingly imperfect people and its intrigue with the eccentric, it evokes something of Robert Altman's more experimental works of the 1970s, and perhaps even Nicholas Roeg, both of whom made films that began with a discernible genre and story that shape-shifted into more nebulous, even dreamy explorations of psychological states.
There's nothing of the outside world outside the home and grounds here, but the small, cloistered bubble between brother and sister is rife with simmering emotions -- ones picked up by the flora and fauna around them, marshalling unseen forces to tip the balance, much like nature itself.
FAMILIAR. Courtesy of Rebecca Mlinek at https://rebeccamlinek.com.
Margaret and Maurice are sister and brother, and both are sharing Margaret's quarters, which she lives in as part of her job as a groundskeeper of a stately, elegant home and estate. She tends the lawns and gardens, as well as the bird feeders and birdhouses, and regularly culls sparrows from them, an invasive species.
Margaret and her brother are very different; she's earthy and no-nonsense, he's accomplished, cultured and self-consciously sophisticated. Cramped in her small living space, he wants to enjoy the owners' home while they're gone, something Margaret forbids. As the pair vie for control, a mysterious cat appears that seems to have its own allegiances, which may tip the balance of power.
Directed and written by Rebecca Mlinek, this disquieting suspense drama charts the power struggle between a sister and brother who are living too close for comfort. Margaret's small room on the grounds where she works is cozy, homespun and charmingly ramshackle, but its charms sour with the presence of her brother Maurice, who peevishly makes his disdain, opinions and judgments known without hesitation. Rendered in intimate, unadorned and earthbound visuals and embellished with a musical score that can veer from pastoral to eerie, it creates an eccentric, almost hermetic world between the siblings that grows in tension and uncanniness until a small but potent power ruptures it.
The storytelling takes time at first to establish the siblings and their differences, conveyed deftly in the dialogue, which intriguingly conveys an old-fashioned New England provenance, both mannered and salt-of-the-earth. How it lands depends on the character: Margaret has a kind of bluestocking, independent toughness, while Maurice is self-consciously erudite but pretentious. They bicker over everything, from how he wants to enjoy the rest of the house to how Margaret kills sparrows as part of her job. They're getting on one another's nerves, which finds Margaret retreating into her often idyllic outdoor work. Then she encounters a mysterious cat that becomes her companion.
As Margaret and Maurice, actors Claire Schoonover and Michael Gabel convey both the long-running relationship of siblings with history between them and the very different temperaments of their individual characters. The dynamic between them can be affectionate and tolerant, but more often than not, it contains seeds of passive aggression. As they wrangle, a power struggle emerges, and when Maurice directly disobeys Margaret's rule about the house, her anger and resentment come to a head, only to be resolved unexpectedly.
Compact, down-to-earth and yet with a tinge of the fairytale-like, FAMILIAR can essentially be encapsulated as a battle over boundaries and respect. With its unvarnished style, its insistence on compellingly imperfect people and its intrigue with the eccentric, it evokes something of Robert Altman's more experimental works of the 1970s, and perhaps even Nicholas Roeg, both of whom made films that began with a discernible genre and story that shape-shifted into more nebulous, even dreamy explorations of psychological states.
There's nothing of the outside world outside the home and grounds here, but the small, cloistered bubble between brother and sister is rife with simmering emotions -- ones picked up by the flora and fauna around them, marshalling unseen forces to tip the balance, much like nature itself.
FAMILIAR. Courtesy of Rebecca Mlinek at https://rebeccamlinek.com.
