Critic Reviews

Balagov‘s latest outing is a warm, colour-saturated and sporadically magical and comical family drama set in a tightly-knit community in Newark, but with tension and trauma looming ever close on its seemingly happy-go-lucky protagonists.

Against the austere beauty of Beanpole, Butterfly Jam can certainly seem messy as it borrows from the crime thriller, depicts a merciless act of violence, and, at times, borders on magical realism. But Balagov’s newest film also has the biggest heart.

It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.

The film is very much about male discomfort with tenderness, and Keoghan neatly communicates his internal conflicts in a mature performance. Keough continues to make her case for being one of the era’s great chameleons.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

Balagov, however, remains the star attraction of “Butterfly Jam,” his fluent, adventurous command of sound and image keeping the film interesting even when not much is happening on screen, and tangibly atmospheric when the narrative pendulum swings too far in the other direction.

At its best and worst, Butterfly Jam unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations.

Butterfly Jam is usually at its best whenever Keough is in the room, and the rare moments in which her and Keoghan’s performances click perhaps offer a glimmer of what might have been.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.