Directed and co-written by Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s Sophie Hyde, Jimpa is a tale of wish fulfillment on multiple levels — often to its detriment. The first level is its plot, which follows an Australian filmmaker, Hannah (Olivia Colman), taking her nonbinary teenager Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) to visit her idiosyncratic gay father, Jim (John Lithgow), in Amsterdam, as she begins work on a movie that idealizes her family’s past.
The second level is the film’s own making. Hannah is a stand-in for Hyde, whose own child, Mason-Hyde, makes their on-screen debut in what amounts to a semi-autobiographical re-telling of Hyde’s family history, with some poetic license to depict conversations the family could never have before Hyde’s real father passed. These two meta-textual layers imbue Jimpa with intrigue. However, their interplay is informed by a third level, which ultimately kneecaps the movie both visually and thematically. Its desire to present a kind of utopian queer acceptance, while commendable as a real-world end goal, yields flattened characters who speak in grating proclamations, and whose pasts are rendered mere flashes, which the movie fails to emotionally anchor.
Jimpa turns queerness — as identity, history, and lived experience — into texture, but texture alone. Of course, it’s hard to dismiss the film outright, because it’s incredibly well-meaning, and because it draws on a painful real-world story. But the way it expresses its intent, and its message about queer acceptance, ends up grasping at authenticity. The film never finds its truth, resulting in a painfully languid work that merely gestures toward real drama.
What is Jimpa about?
Jim — lovingly called “Jimpa” by his grandchild — left his wife and daughters several decades ago. Hannah was 13 at the time, and she tells us in the movie’s opening voiceover that her parents’ split was amicable and mutually supportive. Jim was a gay rights activist who felt constrained in Adelaide, Australia. He abandoned his family for life in the Netherlands at a time of burgeoning metropolitan queer culture and community challenges like the AIDS crisis.
Jim, perpetually single and nonmonogamous, also had a stroke a few years ago, and although he’s mostly recovered, Hannah wants to take the opportunity for Frances to get to know him better while they still have time. Frances is 16, nonbinary, and quite sure of their identity, but unbeknownst to Hannah and their easygoing father, Harry (Daniel Henshall), they plan to stay on in Amsterdam with Jim instead of returning to Adelaide for their penultimate school year. They only reveal this to their parents while en route to Europe, setting up a clear dramatic throughline involving them getting to know Jim better (while he guides them towards discovering their own sexuality and interest in polyamory). However, the film’s oblique relationship to conflict muddles this picture.
At numerous points in the film, Hannah pitches a conflict-free drama about her father to various producers and actors over Zoom, stemming from her rosy view of the past. Jimpa is not exactly that version of events — Hannah’s movie speaks to her avoidance of confrontation — but the real and fictitious films are spiritually aligned. In Jimpa, drama is too easily resolved or hand-waved away; people disagree at first, but come to an understanding without much struggle. Even when the film presents emotional challenges (like the question of Frances staying in Amsterdam, or how to proceed when Jim’s health inevitably declines), it also provides clear conclusions, and few possible deviations stemming from emotional impulse.
The resultant performances, however, are largely worthwhile.
Jimpa constrains its impeccable cast.
The ever-reliable Colman and Lithgow create a shared history where the movie fails to do so (narratively and aesthetically), owing to their dialed-in wit peppered with hidden vulnerabilities. Mason-Hyde, while unfortunately unremarkable in more demanding scenes, carries themselves with an adolescent mix of hesitance and eagerness. This is especially true in Frances’ scenes of sexual discovery with one of Jim’s bisexual students (Zoë Love Smith), though the movie is equally hesitant to capture the character’s experience, and the flood of complicated feelings in its aftermath. It’s all too content with having characters tell us about these emotions, rather than showing us how they might work through them in real time.
Jimpa’s dramatic highlight, however, happens to be Australian actress Kate Box. She appears in only a couple of scenes as Hannah’s sister, Emily, but her troubled, rankled character provides illuminating contrast to Hannah’s non-confrontational nature. Her prickliness is refreshing (and refreshingly human), because no other character seems to have a negative bone in their body. Even Jim, who jests and jabs at Frances’ identity (gender-neutral pronouns are a novelty to his generation), is a loving grandfather who’s said to be provocative for provocation’s sake, albeit without much thought from the movie as to why he might be this way, or if he feels conflicted about it (or how he feels about it at all).
In addition to being a loving grandparent, Jim also fulfills the role of a queer elder passing down knowledge and experience to Frances who, though they’re the president of their school’s LGBTQ club, doesn’t have much of a queer community to speak of. This is where Jimpa at least finds some semblance of academic value; Jim is, after all, a university professor, and he collects pins and buttons from various historical queer movements. However, the movie frames even its arguably vital intergenerational conversations as a superficial string of buzzwords — for instance, about gender and sexuality being spectrums, without observing what those spectrums might entail — woven between fleeting historical imagery.
Jimpa is a blinkered tale of queer history.
Some of the most animated scenes in Jimpa come courtesy of Jim’s middle-aged and elderly gay friends. Like Emily, this group — comprising actors Else De Lanooi, Hans Kesting, and Frank Sanders — appear only in a handful of scenes, but have a lively enough presence to add a sense of queer history to Amsterdam. As a combination of Amsterdam natives and transplants who came up with Jim and lived through communal tumult, they’re all part of his story, and thus, they pique Frances’ curiosity.
However, the way the characters’ lives and pasts are portrayed robs this friend group of three-dimensional personhood. The film’s use of flashback involves quick glimpses of moments while they’re discussed in dialogue, including bittersweet memories during harrowing times, like weaving AIDS memorial quilts. But every high and low of these characters’ lives — including Jim’s — takes on a Ford car commercial sensibility, with hazy, high-contrast shots (usually of people dancing to no music) that feel disconnected from one another. The same approach applies to Hannah and Frances’ flashbacks, with swift bursts of characters catching the camera’s gaze (in brief, head-on close ups), but never meeting it for long enough to create a connection.
This glancing visual approach is technically in tune with how Hyde approaches her story, wherein characters don’t so much exchange ideas as they narrate pre-ordained talking points from the latest round of social media discourse on queerness (for instance, a brief, directionless clash over how the word “queer” has been reclaimed by LGBTQ youth, but still holds painful memories for older gay men). That Jimpa lampshades these conversations as familiar is a meaningless gesture if they’re still the movie’s lingua franca and lead to no real self-reflection.
Jimpa, in this way, ends up talking through its broad ideas on queer culture without ever making them felt. The characters have a sense of history, but it never feels fully lived-in, or painful, or joyous. It so rarely feels human the way, say, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers does, a work whose generational queer gaps are filled by wistful and painful drama. Moments of Jim handing down advice to Frances are reminiscent of Luca Guadagnino’s Call My by Your Name, in which a father doles out life lessons to his queer son, but Jimpa’s version of these swap emotional subtext for verbose soap-boxing destined to never click — to never stir the soul.
Like so much of the movie, these exchanges are all text and no subtext — all words and no feelings — which is, ironically, a facet of modern queerness and label-centric queer culture that Jim jokingly decries. Rather than finding complexity or nuance through differing viewpoints and lived experiences, Jimpa simply ends up highlighting its biggest missteps, via meta-textual moments that almost try to justify them.
Queer art deserves to be joyful and multifaceted, whether it’s highlighting oppression or simply portraying the existence of queer people in ordinary circumstances. However, Jimpa tries and fails to split the difference, as a film with smoothed edges that portrays self-discovery on autopilot.
The result is a dramatic void. Jimpa’s confrontation of history becomes a sanitized experience worth only a nod of acknowledgement, instead of one that might instill affirmation in the face of prejudice or self-doubt. Rarely has there been a queer movie that, on paper, seems so tender and politically necessary, but ends up so eye roll-inducing in execution, fulfilling the most anti-art demands for representational drama sans conflict or rigor.
Jimpa was reviewed out of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
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Review of Sophie Hyde’s semi-autobiographical saga, “Jimpa,” starring Olivia Colman and John Lithgow.
