THE STORY – Fourteen-year-old Eli and 16-year-old Nina are both suffering in the breakdown of their parents’ once loving marriage. In the battle for custody, the siblings must express their wishes, fears and feelings to a judge. While Nina wants to get away from the family as soon as possible, Eli longs for everything to return to how it was before. Their desires are miles apart.
THE CAST – Finn Vogels, Celeste Holsheimer, Carice van Houten & Pieter Embrechts
THE TEAM – Mees Peijnenburg (Director/Writer) & Bastiaan Kroeger (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 89 Minutes
Fracture announces itself quietly in “A Family.” It arrives not through explosive confrontation, but through repetition: the same arguments, the same questions, the same impossible demand placed on two children to translate emotional chaos into clear preferences. Director Mees Peijnenburg resists sensationalism, choosing instead to observe what happens when family life collapses into procedure, and children are asked to navigate adult failure without the language to name it.
At the center of the story stand siblings Eli (Finn Vogels), fourteen, and Nina (Celeste Holsheimer), sixteen, suspended between parents whose marriage has dissolved into legal maneuvering. A custody dispute forces both to articulate their wishes before a judge, transforming private confusion into public testimony. Nina wants distance, autonomy, escape. Eli wants restoration, a return to the version of family life that still feels imaginable. Their desires are incompatible, yet they stem from the same need for security, recognition, and emotional shelter.
The narrative is divided into two mirrored halves, recounting the same three-week period first from Nina’s perspective, then from Eli’s, and combining both siblings just before the film reaches its climax. Moments repeat with altered emphasis. Arguments recur. Gestures are recontextualized. Silences expand. What initially appears straightforward fractures under repetition, revealing how differently the same experience can be felt depending on age, temperament, and survival instinct. The structure privileges emotional dissonance over revelation, allowing misunderstanding to accumulate rather than resolve.
Urgency defines Nina’s section. Old enough to be deemed capable of choice, she is nevertheless trapped in a system that offers autonomy without safety. Panic attacks and breathlessness punctuate her days. Her parents argue whenever they meet, often over logistics disguised as care, and Nina becomes both a witness and leverage. Even school offers no refuge. Emergency contacts are required, explanations are needed, and normality is suspended. Everything feels provisional, emptied of stability. On the other hand, Eli’s point of view shifts the emotional weight. Quieter, more observant, he absorbs tension without articulation, existing in the margins of adult concern. Scenes replay with subtle but decisive differences. Where Nina experiences confrontation, Eli experiences exclusion. A party becomes not an escape, but another instance in which adults, intent on doing the “right” thing, deny him agency altogether. His silence, mistaken for resilience, accumulates into something heavier and more precarious.
The parents remain intentionally opaque. Maria, played by Carice van Houten, brings a muted gravity to a mother buckling under emotional and legal pressure. In her first return to the big screen in six years, van Houten favors exhaustion over collapse, restraint over display. Her involvement extends beyond performance; she also serves as an executive producer, reinforcing the project’s emotional seriousness. Jacob (Pieter Embrechts) is afforded similar restraint, portrayed not as an antagonist but as a father locked into his own defensive logic. Peijnenburg avoids moral arbitration, instead depicting how adult self-justification quietly recruits children into conflicts they did not create.
A similar sensibility extends to the production itself. The project is produced by Lukas Dhont, whose films “Girl” and “Close” cemented his reputation as a key voice in contemporary European, youth-centered cinema. Both titles went on to secure Academy Award nominations for Best International Feature, first as Belgium’s submission and later for the Netherlands, establishing a prestige trajectory that “A Family” clearly gestures toward through its emphasis on adolescent interiority, emotional restraint, and institutional pressure. The influence is not imitative, but the ambition to occupy a comparable awards terrain is evident.
This insistence on the children’s perspective is both the work’s clearest strength and its most limiting choice. By withholding the parents’ shared history and the specifics of the marital rupture, “A Family” remains faithful to how separation is experienced by children: confusing, fragmentary, unresolved. At the same time, the absence of context renders the emotional landscape abstract. Without deeper insight into the adults’ inner lives, the conflict risks feeling procedural rather than lived.
That tension culminates in the refusal of resolution. Custody remains undecided, emotional repair deferred. On one level, this feels truthful. Separation rarely offers closure, and childhood seldom provides clarity. On another, the ending feels less open than suspended, dissolving without forward motion. Reflection replaces catharsis, but at the cost of emotional release. Restraint governs the overall posture. Scenes unfold with a cool, measured calm that mirrors the institutional processes shaping the family’s fate. This distance lends seriousness and avoids manipulation, but it also flattens moments that might otherwise resonate more sharply.
At its core, “A Family” identifies continuity as the central desire of children caught in parental separation. They want fewer arguments, less loneliness, and some recognizable version of home preserved. Peijnenburg renders this longing with empathy. The difficulty lies in translating that insight into sustained emotional involvement. What remains is a thoughtful, well-intentioned work anchored by strong performances and a lucid structural idea. It is perceptive, careful, and quietly humane. Yet its emotional reserve keeps it at a distance, inviting contemplation rather than immersion. Ultimately, it observes pain more effectively than it allows the viewer to feel it.
