Watching Love Age in Real Time

Read Time:4 Minute, 51 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
The LeMieurs
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Genre: Documentary, Family, Drama
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 15m
Director(s): Sammy LeMieur
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: How much of a family’s identity is inherited, and how much is silently imposed? THE LEMIEURS is the kind of documentary that disarms you by refusing to posture. There’s no thesis announced up front, no framing designed to guide you, no reassuring sense that this film knows exactly where it is headed. Instead, filmmaker Sammy LeMieur begins with proximity. He points the camera at his own family and lets time do the shaping. Over four years, what starts as documentation gradually becomes confrontation, not through conflict itself, but through inevitability.

At its core, THE LEMIEURS is about what happens when love, labor, and legacy overlap inside a single family. LeMieur’s grandmother, Beverly, offers the connecting point of the film, not because she dominates the screen, but because everything quietly revolves around her. Her aging, her fading independence, and her unspoken centrality to the family force each generation to reckon with change on terms they can’t control. The film never reduces her to a symbol or a subject. She’s present, stubborn, funny, exhausted, and deeply human.

What makes this documentary so effective is its patience. LeMieur doesn’t rush moments or demand meaning from them. Family gatherings unfold without editorial urgency. Conversations trail off. Silence is allowed to remain. The passage of seasons becomes more than a visual structure; it becomes organic. Winter returns again and again, familiar and survivable. Spring, by contrast, brings uncertainty. That seasonal metaphor is never underlined, but it settles into the film naturally, reinforcing the shift taking place within the family.

The presence of death is constant, but never sensationalized. Three of Beverly’s grandsons operate a funeral home, and their relationship to mortality is professional, routine, and a heavy weight on their lives, although they never say it out loud. The film observes this without commentary, allowing the audience to recognize how living with death as a daily occupation alters perspective. There’s no dramatic contrast drawn between life and death here, because for this family, they coexist. Grief is an ambient constant, part of existing, understanding that death is always a certainty.

Sammy LeMieur’s role as both filmmaker and family member is evident in moments when his presence is felt not just behind the camera but within the fabric of the scene. The film acknowledges that tension rather than pretending neutrality. This isn’t a documentarian pretending to be objective. It is someone grappling with what it means to witness the slow transformation of people he loves, knowing the act of filming is itself a form of participation.

The filmmaking is restrained. Cinematography favors natural light, genuine spaces, and compositions that feel unarranged. The camera doesn’t hunt for meaning; it waits for it. Editing is equally patient, trusting accumulation rather than construction. By the time the film nears its conclusion, the weight it carries feels earned rather than imposed. You understand these people because you have spent time with them, not because the film told you how to feel.

One of the most striking aspects of THE LEMIEURS is its refusal to dramatize family tension. There are disagreements, unspoken resentments, and moments of emotional distance, but they are presented without escalation. The film recognizes that real families often experience change through logistical decisions and small compromises rather than explosive arguments. That choice gives the documentary a deeply earned credibility.

This isn’t a documentary designed to deliver immediate relief or closure. Some audiences may wish for more explicit reflection or resolution. But that restraint is also the film’s strength. THE LEMIEURS understands that aging, loss, and inheritance aren’t problems to be solved. They are conditions to live with.

By the time the film ends, what lingers isn’t a single moment, but a feeling of having been allowed into something private without exploitation. It’s rare for a first feature documentary to handle intimacy with this level of care and self-awareness. THE LEMIEURS doesn’t confuse access with entitlement. It earns its closeness by staying present, honest, and unshowy.

This is a film about family, but it’s not sentimental. It’s about tradition, but not nostalgia. It recognizes beauty and burden as inseparable, and it trusts the audience to sit with that complexity. THE LEMIEURS is devastating in the way real life often is, not through grand tragedy, but through time doing what it always does.

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[photo courtesy of BOOMERANG FILM]

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