Due to obvious reasons, it’s been a long time since I watched a movie in a cinema. So when The Projector re-opened and I was invited to catch this film, I didn’t really take the time to research the background and context. All I knew was that this was a Werner Herzog production which meant that there was likely to be some novelty in the style. I left the cinema unsettled by the absurdist picture following Yuichi, a for-hire actor who will play the role of a family member.

The main plot is that of a mother who hires Yuichi to play a returning long-disappeared father for 12-year Mahiro. The awkward tension is overwhelming, as Mahiro obviously must set her fear of engaging new people against her craving to establish a relationship with a father figure. In a climate that is fearful of abusive relationships between young women and father figures, this is a reminder that a healthy and loving relationship between men and daughters has lost its normalcy in the media.

There are many B-plots to show the versatility of the company that Yuichi runs, where he and his employees play stand-in fathers, husbands and even other specific roles. This is accompanied by long glossing segments that reinforce the mesmerizing and dreamy feel of the movie. At certain points, one worries that the movie may have no trajectory or resolution.

Herzog does not disappoint in that regard, playing out Yuichi’s struggle between his own identity and the identities of the characters he plays. Specifically Mahiro and Mahiro’s mother start getting close with Yuichi, to the point where they invite him to be an official part of the family. Yuichi realizes how far he has come and the line he has crossed, instead proposing the death of the father figure, even rehearsing the emotionally terrifying scene in a funeral parlor.

There are many important themes in this movie. Most salient is the performativity of the roles in our lives. Often, while we can perform the roles of fathers, husbands and other family members, we fall short of in essence “being” any of those roles when we fail to accompany the performance with love, commitment and reciprocity. Yet, that doesn’t negate the space being held for such performances, hired or not. Sometimes, we just need that human touch or reinforcement to get us through a phase, and the person need not stay beyond that period. Perhaps it was Herzog’s intention to keep the film so absurdist and surreal so that one can remain detached enough from the movie to make such an observation. Truly an arthouse film, Family Romance LLC will get your gears going.

Here’s my rating of the movie below:

Cinematography: 4/5

Screenwriting: 2/5

Musical Score: 3/5

Acting/ Performance: 3/5

Overall: 3/5