The process of assembling a team of family members for one big picture is a task that may seem monumental to many. But for memory’s sake, the wrangling of generations is well worth it because you never know what’s around the corner. At the beginning of Lucy Kerr’s muted and tightly constructed first feature, ‘Family Portrait,’ a wild glimpse of a family gathering around a tree wearing Santa hats for their 2021 Christmas photo takes place. It’s a sunny summer day, and you might ask yourself why this family is so far ahead of the curve. An abundance of sudden foreboding elements come together as escalators in Kerr’s film and a suspension of time itself. Inside this beautiful, sprawling family estate full of green grass, tennis courts, and lakes, young children play, and certain scenes sit in on conventional family conversations.
Little does everyone know a tornado is brewing, but not in the sense of a cumulonimbus cloud to threaten this slice of heaven. This particular story takes place right before the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You may miss it if you blink, but Kerr has an innate sense of using subtle imagery and nature to depict this perfect spot that will soon be marked. While the camera follows random characters going about their daily vacation activities, a scene will focus on gusts of wind moving through the trees like the airborne pathogen is knocking on the door.
Family Portrait / Photo: Lights On Film
It makes sense why (at least at first) the elements of ‘Family Portrait’ are still and slowly ramp up with a sense of urgency. Katy (Deragh Campbell) and her boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust) have had their fill of relaxation and have to get to the airport soon. What stands in the way is taking the ole’ family photo, one Olek cannot be in because he and Katy are not married. (family rule, I suppose). Even though the flight is on the horizon, the atmosphere is relatively chill — until there’s talk of a young family member passing away. That piece of news fragments all of the happenings soon after. Suddenly, Katy’s mother is nowhere to be found, and the order of things becomes disrupted — for Katy, at least. Inside her is a confluence of issues that, oddly, the people around her don’t share. There’s the issue of her mother going missing, impeding her ability to take the picture and the flight, which she feels will be missed as the moments pass. Oh, and then there are siblings and friends discussing diseases in a casual tone related to the family member’s death.
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Kerr uses the soon-to-be-panicked demeanor Campbell displays within her character to show something is quite off. It’s the same feeling many of us had on the doorstep of the pandemic, not knowing how it completely re-arranged our lives (still to this day). Something is clearly off here, but Katy is the only one who can’t escape the jaws of disassociation. ‘Family Portrait” quotes part of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 poem “The Conqueror Worm.” While the entirety of the poem sums up death as a sad certainty, the passages noted speak of walking in a continuous loop. In a scene towards the conclusion in which Katy returns to the house after swimming in a lake, she feels like she is walking in another dimension. The people around her are unaware of danger and can’t quite touch it. ‘Family Portrait’ shows its cards to have much more to say other than its metaphorical dose of surrealism. Things and ideologies are teased in simple conversations, and perhaps the lack of awareness may speak volumes. 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.
