The titular protagonist of “Yep” is a man who is charming one moment and annoying the next. Jim – named Jimpa by his wide-eyed non-binary granddaughter Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) – is a longtime gay rights activist, generous to the people he cares about and often as witty and charismatic as any character. John Lithgow ever played. But as his daughter, filmmaker Hannah (Olivia Colman), often states that he is also stubborn and selfish, with a tendency to disappoint the people who trust him. The film surrounding him turns out to be just as frustrating.
“Jimpa” is a well-intentioned drama with a lot on its mind about queer elders, unconventional families and growing to understand one’s parent as a human being. But between an over-reliance on gritty indie films—from its soft lighting to its haunting, overly sensitive score—and a central family dynamic that never feels readable, the end result is more annoying than enlightening.
Directed by Sophie Hyde — best known for the acclaimed two-hander “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — “Jimpa” populates its golden queer Amsterdam streets with a variety of minor characters, but it’s essentially a three-hander between three generations of a unconventional family. During the summer, when Hannah begins pre-production on a film based on her father coming out and deciding to leave her, her sister and their mother in Adelaide when she was just a teenager, she takes Frances on a trip to visit their grandfather. When Frances awkwardly reveals to Hannah that they are queuing for the plane, this trip is also a test run of sorts – fed up with their small Adelaide high school, Frances wants a bigger queer community for herself and wants to spend a school year living in Amsterdam with Jim to achieve it.
When the couple arrive at Jim’s smartly decorated townhouse, the man plays entertainer for his “Grandthing”, introducing them to his friend group of aging queens and fantastic stories about his days fighting for queer rights – shown in brief flashbacks where a silent Bryn Chapman Parish plays a young Jim, all of whom look like something out of a music video for a queer pop artist. As this seduction takes place, Hannah lurks in the background, worried that her child will be disappointed, while growing increasingly worried about Jim’s ever-intruding mortality.
It’s all great material for a messy and uniquely queer tale of family tension, but the script for “Jimpa” — which Hyde co-wrote with Matthew Cormack — seems afraid to let the conflict boil over into something hotter than lukewarm. The dialogue is overly blunt and doesn’t leave much to your imagination, as Hannah and Jim’s various friends openly talk about his faults and failings, while showing little in the way of real anger or hurt towards him. All tension and resentment is on the surface, and what is theirs turns out to be disappointed superficially.
One of the best actors working today, Colman valiantly tries to carry the film, and she wrings genuine heartbreak out of the pain and resentment that Hannah buries. But she is underserved by a script that is both excessively broad and unsure of how charred and strained the relationship between father and daughter should be. Hannah is somehow able to nonchalantly chat with her husband and friends about how her father is a self-absorbed man out to hurt his child, while trying to assemble a film based on his abandonment of her that portrays their relationship as rosy and uncomplicated.
It’s a central contradiction that the film never makes coherent, and a bizarre rudimentary plot about her attraction to Jim’s assistant (Eamon Farren) only underscores how loose a hold “Jimpa” has on this woman – and how her husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) can be well be completely absent from how little the film can think of a place for him in its dynamic.
The other two points of the central triangle are not much stronger. Frances, in particular, is a thin outline of a stereotypical Gen Z baby gay, and Mason-Hyde lacks the acting chops to make the character’s half-formed nature feel like a reflection of their youth rather than thin writing; a magical night out discovering the queer scene in Amsterdam doesn’t really convey a sense of excitement when the characters are busy talking about polyamory and queerness in a way that feels lectured to the audience rather than natural.
Jim, as the center around which these characters revolve, fares better. And it helps that Lithgow deftly conveys the charm that draws an entourage to him, the arrogance they’ve all decided to put up with, and the subtle insecurities and fears of aging. At the same time, the character doesn’t have much to bounce off of: his arguments against Frances (whom he constantly misgenders and apologizes to) feel like knee-jerk attempts to replicate queer arguments across generations rather than something specific to these people at this moment in their lives.
Just when it feels like their conflict has reached a tipping point to go somewhere interesting, the final act veers abruptly into conventional tearjerker territory. It’s a plot point rooted in real life — Hyde based the film on his own experiences with a queer father and a non-binary child — meaning there’s some real, raw emotion lurking beneath its predictable beats. At the same time, Hyde’s closeness to the material may be why the film is so keen to brush thornier, messier emotions under the rug in favor of something far less interesting. Throughout the film, Hannah has arguments with people she is auditioning for her project, insisting that her film will be a story of “love, not conflict” and ignoring criticism about how empty a film like that would be. It is to the disadvantage of “Jimpa” that it makes basically the same mistake.
Grade: C-
“Jimpa” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.
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