‘Jimpa’: Sundance Review

Dir: Sophie Hyde. Australia/Netherlands. 2025. 124mins 

In Jimpa, a filmmaker must reconcile her feelings about her gay father — a passionate, larger-than-life figure who hasn’t always been easy to love. For Good Luck To You, Leo Grande director Sophie Hyde, who co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Cormack, the story draws from a very personal place, and the tenderness she feels toward her three generations of characters shines through. Led by layered performances from Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, Hyde’s fifth feature is an affectionate, perceptive observation about the quiet difficulties of family, even if the picture overstays its welcome with a melodramatic, predictable final third.

Affectionate, perceptive, even if it overstays its welcome 

This is Hyde’s fourth film to premiere at Sundance, where its star cast should make Jimpa an attractive prospect for buyers. The script’s articulate encapsulation of the struggles of trans and gay characters, no matter their age, should help commercial prospects.

Colman plays Hannah, an Australian director putting together her new film: a story about a woman whose parents divorced, in part, because her father came out as gay. As we quickly learn, Hannah has based the plot on her own childhood, when her dad Jim (Lithgow) moved to Amsterdam to be his authentic self. Hannah is raising the nonbinary 16-year-old Frances (Hyde’s own child Aud Mason-Hyde) with her sweet but ineffectual husband Harry (Daniel Henshall), and plans a long-overdue family trip to see Jim.

When Frances informs their parents that they want to move to Amsterdam permanently to live with their beloved grandfather. Hannah has severe misgivings but, figures that her difficult dad will prove himself to be such a self-absorbed handful that Frances will realise it’s a bad idea.

Dedicated to Hyde’s late father, Jimpa was inspired by aspects of the director’s life, although the story and characters have been fictionalised. In its early stretches, this gentle, emotionally candid story exudes a welcome messiness as Hyde presents Hannah, Frances and Jim as complicated, bighearted individuals who care about one another, even if they sometimes have major conflicts. Hannah wants her out-and-proud child to be happy, but she fears that Frances is too young to be leaving small-town Adelaide to move to Amsterdam. (Additionally, while Frances worships their colourful gay grandfather Jim — who prefers being called ‘Jimpa’ to ‘Grandpa’ — she knows that he’s easier to love from a distance than in person.) Jimpa features no villains, poignantly aware that all families consist of complementary but also contradictory personalities.

The three leads all give touching performances accented by the screenplay’s initially subtle brushstrokes. Colman plays a frustrated director who cannot get financiers or potential cast members to understand the nuances of why she wants to make a film, as Hannah constantly puts it, about “kindness, not conflict.” But as Jimpa goes along, we understand how Hannah has avoided confrontation in her own life – a stance that will be challenged once she faces the prospect of losing young Frances to the wider world.

Lithgow perhaps has the trickiest assignment as Jim, an outspoken LGBTQIA+ activist who could not be more charming — but also has a tendency toward self-righteousness and insensitivity. For all of Jim’s talk about the oppression he faced as a gay man during the AIDS epidemic, he can be quick to misgender his grandchild, making snide jokes about pronouns. (In one painful scene, Jim mocks the very possibility that Frances could be bisexual, insisting that there’s no such thing.) Lithgow conveys what is both appealing and exasperating about this gregarious man who has never believed in monogamy and is entering his twilight years alone.

Because of the film’s generosity toward its imperfect characters, one wants to be patient with Jimpa’s late twist, which sends the story in a mawkish direction. Hyde has certainly built up enough audience goodwill that we are invested in what happens to the characters — including Mason-Hyde’s impressionable Frances, who is hungry to find their tribe and also maybe even love — but the plotting grows more familiar and manipulative. What was once sharp and perceptive becomes muddled and repetitive. Hyde is so close to this family that she has trouble letting them go.