Directed by Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde — the mastermind behind Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – Jimpa isn’t just an indie gem tailor-made for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Co-written by Hyde and her longtime collaborator Matthew Cormack, Jimpa is less of a narrative, and more of a family’s attempt to make peace with a story long finished, and a person long passed. It’s a tragic, layered, beautifully personal tale of intergenerational relationships among the LGBTQ community, and those closest to it. However, as a film, its sweetness can work against it.
Hannah (Olivia Colman) is a mild-mannered filmmaker who is hard at work making a movie – a movie based on her own childhood, following her father’s coming out as gay and her parents’ divorce. Hannah’s estranged father, Jim (John Lithgow), divorced her mother after coming out as gay, moving to Amsterdam to start a new, authentic life – and leaving Hannah and her sister Emily (Kate Box) with a lot of unresolved abandonment issues.
When Hannah receives news that Jim has suffered a stroke and his health is failing, she decides now is the perfect time to reconnect with her father, and introduce him to his grandchild, Hannah’s non-binary 16-year-old, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde). When Frances abruptly announces their intention to move to Amsterdam and live with Grandpa Jim (who prefers to be called “Jimpa”) it comes as a major shock to the family. When Frances, Hannah, and Hannah’s good-intentioned husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) finally meet Jimpa, an epic intergenerational collision occurs, forcing this queer family to confront their own shortcomings and ignorances – and reconnect with one another with a new, tender perspective.
Jimpa was clearly pulled from a very close and personal place. The main characters are essentially analogues of Hyde and her own family – quite literally, in the case of non-binary teen Frances, played by Hyde’s own child, Aud Mason-Hyde. It deals with a very complicated piece of family history, fictionalized. This isn’t the first time Hyde has tackled this subject, albeit in a different manner: Her 2013 film 52 Sundays follows a teenager’s journey as her parent comes out as transgender. However, unlike the harrowing misadventures of 52 Sundays, Jimpa is considerably lighter and softer and much more generous — or at least it tries to be.
Jimpa marks the director’s fourth Sundance premiere – however, this time, her usual sweet, sentimental brand of cinema is bolstered by some staggering star power in the form of Colman and Lithgow, neither of whom need any introduction. However, given the tender and thorny subject matter, and the complicated characters they play, Colman and Lithgow must be commended for bringing their usual A-game, this time with an extra degree of sensitivity and subtlety.
Colman as the introspective and timorous Hannah brings incredible nuance and empathy to her role, providing the proper emotional anchor to a story in desperate need of grounding. Superstar Hollywood veteran Lithgow excels in his portrayal of the larger-than-life yet deeply complicated Jim, at equal turns lovable yet hard to love, endearing and distant, tragic and exasperating. Kate Box as Hannah’s sister Emily stands out as the lone prickly presence, a much-needed dose of realism to this almost unrealistically accepting, sex-positive world. It’s probably not fair to compare young Aud Mason-Hyde’s performance to their co-stars, who are essentially modern-day Hollywood royalty. However, during some pivotal — and somewhat disturbing — scenes, Mason-Hyde gets a chance to hold their own in this star-studded cast.
Olivia Colman and John Lithgow Bring Their A-Game to a Staid Story
JimpaImage via Kino Lorber
Running just shy of two hours, Jimpa has a lot to say about the prickly nuances of intergenerational angst, parent-child relationships, the generation gap, and how all of this plays out against the backdrop of LGBTQ themes, past and present. Jim and Frances both fall under the queer umbrella, but grew up under very different circumstances, and display very different mores, reflecting the times, places and people they grew up with.
It’s a thorny subject, one that requires a detailed eye, compassion, and a sense of nuance. Hyde and her team certainly display these qualities, as the film goes to great lengths to humanize this sympathetic, yet deeply flawed and tormented cast of characters. However, this overflow of compassion can be overwhelming, to the point where it almost drowns both the story and the audience.
The final act especially suffers from this over-abundance of sentimentality, taking what would be an otherwise solid, emotional venture in family dynamics, identity and reconciliation, into “after school special” territory. Even before the finale, Jimpa sometimes goes off the rails and casts aside all subtlety for overwrought, emotional displays with all the precision and grace of a sledgehammer to bricks.
It doesn’t help that Jimpa is so deeply a product of its time. Yes, in time periods of extreme conservativism, where gay, trans and other marginalized sexual identities are aggressively persecuted, some anvils need to be dropped, and subtext can – and should – be text when it’s necessary. However, the characters — especially the teenage, chronically-online non-binary Frances — are prone to dropping very obvious buzzwords and canned, internet-coded phrases, cheapening what could have otherwise been candid and down-to-earth conversations about sexuality and identity.
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Jimpa Says a Lot About LGBTQ History And The Generational Divide – At the Cost of Storytelling
JimpaImage via Kino Lorber
This is especially true of the cultural and generational divide between Frances and Jim, the latter having participated in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, and suffered poignant losses during the AIDS crisis. The buzzwords also, rather clumsily, expose this further divide, with the term “queer” having very different meanings between grandparent and grandchild, not to mention Jim’s and Frances’ conflicting perspectives on representation, gender dynamics, and Frances’ transgender identity and pronouns.
Neither comes out looking like a bad person — this is one of those antagonist-free films where trauma is the real villain, that old chestnut. But these scenes do highlight a present tension that the film could have explored more deeply and creatively than the standard coming-of-age blueprint. They also decently depict the very personal flaws and shortcomings of two people in very different stages of life, and what they can — and cannot — reconicle with each other.
Hyde created Jimpa to confront and exorcise some very powerful inner demons and a lot of deep, understandable wounding. Jimpa’s enitre presentation and production just oozes catharsis. It’s a highly emotionally intelligent and candid film. It tackles the intricacies and complications of intergenerational conflict, the checkered and often tragic history of a marginalized community, whose expectations and mores continue to shift to the present day.
It’s also already difficult to create a portrait of such a large and diverse group, with very distinct branches spanning the intersection of race, nationality and culture. In all fairness to Hyde’s, and her family’s, distinct, Australian perspective and lived experience, Jimpa is at its best when it zeroes in on said intimate, personal and idiosyncratic aspects of Hannah and her family’s joys and sorrows.
The film touches on a very raw and real nerve around familial angst and wounds left to fester with little closure. However, despite this wellspring of human drama, Jimpa doesn’t seem to want to dwell too much on the uglier, yet highly necessary, aspects of familial conflict. Hannah’s central character trait is her fear of confrontation, the reason she’s avoided seeing her father and re-opening those old wounds of abandonment. Jim and Frances both do unflattering, impulsive or downright foolish things that could have easily served as a catalyst for some real character development — of which drama is an excellent vehicle. Except the film doesn’t go there.
Jimpa Is a Story of Family Conflict – With Less Emphasis On Conflict
JimpaImage via Kino Lorber
Conflict is the lifeblood of any good narrative, and without it, a story is just a series of things happening in succession and little more. Sadly, this is the fatal flaw of Jimpa. This is a very meta film: Hannah, as Hyde’s counterpart, is making a film about a woman whose parents divorced after her father came out as gay, in part based on Hannah’s own life and her relationship with her father.
Naturally, Hyde wants the story — and the viewer — to be gentle and generous with its frustrating characters. And why not, with the narrative being so near, dear and close to home? However, for the rest of the world, and film-goers, generosity isn’t so easily spared, and the characters come across as more exasperating than they are intended to be.
For all its storytelling shortcomings, Jimpa is beautifully shot and edited. Set against the backdrop of Nick Ward’s sensitive soundtrack, Jimpa is presented as a tapestry that almost evokes Isao Takahata’s introspective Studio Ghibli sleeper, Only Yesterday. Every shot conveys a sense of sweetness that more easily and gracefully achieves the tenderness Hyde worked so hard to depict through her troubled characters’ tattered adventures. Even as the film comes to its sad but inevitable conclusion, cinematographer Matthew Chuang never slips, presenting a beautiful world — Adelaide, Helsinki and Amsterdam — filled with bittersweetness, fading away to a gentle send off with a serenade of “I Know a Place.”
At nearly two hours of runtime and little time in between for any sort of rest, Jimpa is just too weighty, unwieldy and sickly-sweet for its own good. Had Hyde been willing to trim some fat, temper the trauma, and struck a more careful balance between tenderness, tears and tranquility, Jimpa could have easily been a modern dramedy tour-de-force.
As it is, it’s just so melodramatic, heavy-handed, expository and conflict-free, that it leaves viewers exhausted, with little time in between scenes to breathe. The insistent, almost utopian approach to the sexual revolution and its queer characters ends up de-fanging a story that could have more strongly benefited from some bite, and even a little ambiguity.
Jimpa will be in theaters February 6, 2026.
Jimpa
Release Date
February 6, 2026
Runtime
123 minutes
Director
Sophie Hyde
Writers
Matthew Cormack, Sophie Hyde
Pros & Cons
- Tender and empathetic performances, especially from Olivia Colman and John Lithgow.
- Evocative cinematography, editing and music.
- Sincere and genuine exploration of intergenerational relationships in the LGBTQ community.
- Heavy-handed, expository and long-winded.
- Frustratingly low in conflict and proper narrative.
