Lucy Kerr’s debut feature film Family Portrait– now streaming on Metrograph at Home– transforms the familiar territory of family drama into a surreal and quietly haunting observation of connection, loss, and time’s looming presence. Deragh Campbell’s character Katy tries desperately to pull her family away from surface-level conversations and outdoor wanderings to take part in the annual tradition of creating a portrait for the family Christmas card, but as the family’s casual disregard grows and Katy’s mother is nowhere to be found, Katy’s fragmented obsession with the portrait becomes more unsettling. 

Growing up in suburban Houston’s high society of old money, Kerr set out to depict Texas in a very specific way that juxtaposes with the stereotypical portrayal of Texans in film. There are the typical portrayals of cowboys, everyone toting and shooting guns… archetypal depictions that have little room for nuance. 

“I didn’t want to make a stereotypical depiction of Texas. I get tired of the stereotypes that people make about Texas,” she remarks. Kerr attended boarding school in Michigan during high school, and after graduating from the University of Texas, she arrived in New York where people had very clear yet overblown ideas about what Texas is like. Kerr’s vision of the quiet Hill Country in Texas isn’t the impending danger of the Wild West.  

The rustling of trees, open grassy fields, and winding river present themselves as characters in the vast landscape. During filming in the hot months of central Texas (the temperature sometimes reaching 105 degrees), the river’s presence became increasingly important to both the crew and the story. It was a spot to cool down about filming, but also a crucial motif.

Cinematographer Lidia Nikonova gave Kerr a book about symbols that interpreted the river as a representation of time, and the cycle of life and death. “After thinking about that symbol of the river, I wanted it to become more mythical,” Kerr explains. The mythical and the realistic are omnipresent as the sounds of trees rustling are contrasted with sound designer Andrew Siedenburg’s droning, discordant sounds and groups of family members moving in the backyard like the ebb and flow of the river. 

Kerr didn’t initially implement the surreal tone, but she was inspired to go beyond the realm of a more traditional family drama after watching the Argentinean comedy-drama La Ciénaga, Luis Buñuel’s satirical Exterminating Angel, and the fantasy-infused Thai drama Tropical Malady. Right before filming, she had assigned Tropical Malady in a college film class that she was teaching, and its gradual descent into surrealism and use of the forest and river left an impression on Kerr. 

Despite the surrealism, many aspects of Family Portrait were inspired by Kerr’s own life. The vacation property in the movie was shot in her family’s vacation house, with many of the books and stories in the film inspired by her own upbringing. Even with the nerves of instilling so much of her own personal life in such a public medium, Kerr found a new vantage point for how to view her life and family’s dynamic- stating that “it’s an interesting way for people to start” for her inaugural full-length film. 

“Sometimes when we’re trying so much for things to be good, it masks. It makes more complicated or difficult conversations harder to have that are important in getting closer as well,” she says. The family’s conversations rarely shift into deeper themes at first as they talk about the amusing history of a family military photo and read an excerpt from a Barbara Bush biography. As a later exchange about a young relative’s death draws in a more serious tone during the beginning of COVID (before the virus was known), the family deflects from digging into a deeper discussion. 

The portrait is an immortalization of the family at that time, and yet a stark reminder of change. “I feel like death is kind of always lingering around family, so that was something that I was thinking about, and how family pictures try to immortalize their family so that we always, whenever we see each other, we’ll have a memory, we’ll have this picture just in case something happens to somebody,” Kerr explains. 

Kerr’s ability to turn something innocuous into an unsettling source of tension reverberates throughout Family Portrait. A jovial Christmas portrait morphs into a symbolic form of permanent connection in a world that never stays the same. Casual conversations carry on despite the mother seemingly disappearing. A sprawling backyard on a quiet day is the backdrop for Katy’s desperate attempts to find her mother and gather the family. 

The naturalistic dialogue grounds the family in a realistic way that makes the audience feel more like an observer sitting next the relatives. When the darkness sets in, the brevity is palpable. “As the dialogue’s spilled on one another- the dialogue’s about mortality and illness and everything- then you really feel the weight of that over the course of the film,” Kerr explains. 

Most of the dialogue was acted as it was written on the page- with each family member’s conversations slowly revealing their characteristics and traits rather than solely developing into plot devices. “When I wrote it, I tried to think about the language that they say as just like material rather than what they say as a way to drive the plot forward,” Kerr says. Even though the crew had under a mere two weeks to shoot the film and a couple of days to rehearse, the performances were so important that only one or two scenes of dialogue were captured per day. 

Family Portrait alternates between observational moments of stillness and expansive scenes of movement. Inspired by the lingering camerawork in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, Nikonova’s long Steadicam shots survey the land and recreations of the family that later turn more erratic as the camera bounces off Katy when she’s by the river “like it’s in a stream.” Balancing the two opposing methods relied on going by feel and intuition rather than technicality. “I think the challenge is more in the edit… finding the balance and pacing between the still moments and then the like, chaotic family dialogue because they contrast with each other,” Kerr says. 

Filming inside the house was also challenging since there was limited space for camera movement, but Kerr’s background in choreography made shooting the opening scene of Katy prying and pulling through a chaotic jumble of family members easier to coordinate. As a choreographer, she excels in working with large groups, and envisioned the opening scene of interconnected people moving like a landscape while finding a flow through the chaos. 

“I knew going into the project that those scenes would be my strength, and the scenes that were actually maybe in a smaller confined space like the kitchen where there is written dialogue but not so much movement… yeah, that might be more of a challenge for me to still kind of feel like it has a life when the camera is static and people are just standing and talking to one another,” she says. 

Kerr’s approach to interpreting her own thoughts on family, loss, and anxieties about the future in a dreamlike yet personal way make Family Portrait a remarkable and memorable experience that captures the ups and downs of family relationships.

She’s already working on her next feature film, and it’s only going to get darker. Also set in Texas, it’s about a woman in a sorority at the University of Texas who travels home to Houston to attend a debutante ball.. oh, and she might be possessed. It’s a bigger project that will be more driven by plot, but expect it to still be mystical and surreal. “I’m excited. I think it’s a nice evolution from Family Portrait,” Kerr says. “It’ll be very playful, fun.”