Comfort Can Still Be Uncomfortable

Read Time:5 Minute, 24 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Jimpa
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 53m
Director(s): Sophie Hyde
Writer(s): Sophie Hyde, Matthew Cormack
Cast: Olivia Colman, John Lithgow, Aud Mason-Hyde, Daniel Henshall, Kate Box, Eamon Farren, Cody Fern
Where to Watch: opens February 6, 2026, in New York and Los Angeles with a national expansion to follow

RAVING REVIEW: What happens when doing the right thing for your child means reopening wounds you never fully processed yourself? JIMPA places the core of its story around that uneasy question, placing a mother, her nonbinary teenager, and her aging gay father in the same emotional sphere and refusing to let any of them escape without consequence. Rather than building toward a single answer, director/co-writer Sophie Hyde’s deeply personal film settles into the discomfort of competing truths, asking how love, autonomy, and responsibility coexist when family history refuses to stay quiet.

At the center is Hannah, a filmmaker and mother portrayed by Olivia Colman, with a restraint that feels deliberate rather than muted. Hannah takes her trans nonbinary teenager, Frances, to Amsterdam to visit Jim, her father, affectionately known as Jimpa. Jim is openly gay, aging, charming, provocative, and deeply loved. What begins as a visit framed by affection and curiosity shifts when Frances expresses a desire to stay with Jimpa for a year. That request becomes the film’s pivot, not because it’s shocking, but because it forces everyone involved to confront the stories they’ve been telling themselves about family, freedom, and what it actually takes to be supportive.

Hyde frames this not as a battle between right and wrong, but as a collision between lived experiences. Hannah’s parenting philosophy has been built around safety, presence, and availability. Jim’s worldview is shaped by survival, independence, and the need to carve out joy in a world that once offered very little protection. Frances stands between them, confident in their identity, mindful of adult contradictions, and unwilling to accept inherited narratives without question. The film’s tension comes from watching these perspectives overlap, misalign, and occasionally hurt one another.

Aud Mason-Hyde’s performance as Frances is one of the film’s true triumphs. Frances is written and played as a teenager who isn’t defined by confusion or trauma, but by clarity and curiosity. The challenges they face come less from uncertainty than from navigating the emotional boundaries of the adults who love them. That distinction matters. JIMPA treats Frances’ identity as a given, not a problem to be solved, and instead explores how even loving environments can struggle when real-world consequences test ideals.

John Lithgow brings warmth, humor, and a slightly dangerous charisma to Jimpa. Jim is affectionate and generous, but also prone to provocation, sometimes mistaking honesty for harmlessness. Lithgow understands how to play that duality without softening it. Jimpa’s stories of the past, particularly those shaped by queer life during the AIDS crisis, carry both wisdom and blind spots. The film doesn’t romanticize his generation, nor does it diminish the weight of what they endured. Instead, it asks what responsibility comes with having survived, and how that survival shapes expectations placed on the next generation.

Colman portrays Hannah as someone who believes in kindness, sometimes to the point of avoiding conflict. Her discomfort isn’t rooted in rejection of Frances’ autonomy, but in unresolved grief and abandonment tied to her own relationship with her father. JIMPA is especially effective at connecting these emotional threads without spelling them out. Hannah’s resistance isn’t framed as control, but as a fear of repeating a loss she never fully processed.

Hyde’s direction favors observation over emphasis. Moments that could easily become speeches remain grounded in awkward pauses and unfinished thoughts. That approach will resonate deeply with viewers who recognize their own families in these moments, and it may frustrate those expecting a sharper focus. The film’s structure mirrors its themes, choosing messiness over momentum, and that choice is both its strength and its limitation.

What JIMPA offers is a rare depiction of an LGBTQIA2S+ family that isn’t defined by crisis or opposition. This is a story about people who love each other, who are trying to do right by one another, and who sometimes fail despite good intentions. The film’s generosity lies in refusing to flatten those failures into villains or heroes. Everyone here is trying, and trying doesn’t always look noble.

The Amsterdam setting functions less as just a beautiful backdrop and more as a space of possibility. It represents freedom, distance, and the allure of reinvention, especially for Frances. For Hannah, it becomes a place where old wounds resurface, even as she watches her child imagine a future unburdened by those same histories.

By the time the film closes, JIMPA hasn’t solved its biggest questions, and that feels appropriate. Families don’t resolve themselves; they adjust, they recalibrate, and they keep negotiating what care looks like as circumstances change. Hyde understands that truth, and she trusts the audience enough to leave them there, inside that ongoing conversation, rather than offering an easy answer.

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER, CLOSER PRODUCTIONS, MAD ONES FILMS, VIKING FILM, ROSEWOOD PICTURES]

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