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There’s a bracing directness with which Tim Ellrich approaches the demands and guilt within caregiving in his narrative feature debut, “In My Parents’ House” (Im Haus meiner Eltern, 2025). The central character, the middle-aged Holle (Jenny Schily), is caught at a crossroads. When her mother has a fall and is hospitalized, Holle cannot but keep going back to her parent’s house. Her siblings have rowed past years ago, reflecting little or no concern for either the parents or their brother, Sven (Jens Brock).
Detachment doesn’t come easy to her. She invests deeply in care and unfailing attention only to be pushed away and barely acknowledged. It seems a thankless pursuit yet one which has got a vice-like grip on her. Receding from it might be emotionally healthier than flailing to rescue the family. What does she hope for in tightly holding onto what in return offers her only grief and rejection? Guilt tails her. She feels she ought to be constantly available for the needs of her parents, especially now that her father finds himself overwhelmed with looking after Sven.
Her husband Dieter’s nonchalant cynicism can’t batter her devotion. He probes Holle into digging as to why she helps her parents. What exactly is binding her so firmly, unshakably to them? Isn’t it just adherence to social conventions? Would she even do the same if they didn’t have the social status, and widely legible roles as her parents? Is there love at all between Holle and them or she’s just buried herself in playing by the script? Holle refuses to address the question and its attendant anxieties. All she knows is they are her parents and she must be present for them.
It’s not that Holle doesn’t call on her siblings to step in and do their bit. Everyone backs off in the matter of Sven. She’s left in charge. Neither does she find in herself the conviction, strength of spirit to simply walk away from the complicated, demanding circumstances. Her mother, too, isn’t quite aboard Holle’s taking over. Neither will she tolerate Holle’s judging insinuations that she and her husband haven’t been great parents to Sven.
Why was his treatment stopped? Sven was diagnosed with schizophrenia thirty years back. Since then, he hasn’t been tested or put on any medications. Sven is retreating, swatting away both his father and sister’s exhausted, exasperated efforts at communication. He resists aid, he wants to do things his way no matter its inconveniences. It’s a stab at agency which those around him would rather deny him.
Holle is weary that she can’t figure him out. “He just exists”, she tells her husband. Where’s the desire, a set of goals that motivate the thrust of life? Shot in black and white, the film is wrapped in somber restraint. The walls of the house reverberate with a stifling unease. There’s so much that yearns to be said, a swirl of anger and resentment and despair shooting through the air.
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In My Parents’ House relies, to a great degree, on Schily’s performance. She is its wounded, brittle center, straining to steady herself emotionally in the churn of perceived family obligations. Holle is a spiritual healer by practice. She nurses long-suffering patients. Dieter is skeptical of her work as well. She asserts that he might not comprehend it, but it makes her happy. Only Sven remains doggedly out of grasp. Each time she reaches out, she is rebuffed.
The film, borne of Ellrich’s own caregiving experiences, never castigates Sven’s stance of seeming absolute non-cooperation. We don’t drift from Holle’s overwhelmed perspective, something she tries to pin down behind a stoic front. Her gestures, and suggestions in steering Sven into a different, positive direction are all but turned down. In My Parents’ House understands and mines the act of caregiving in all its restless, fractious emotional mix.
Does the bond get leached of love and turn into a mechanical routine dripping with bitterness, and roiled undercurrents? Ellrich examines each of these colliding emotional notes in an unassuming manner. The tension in the house is always leaping out but he maintains it as a slow simmer. It all builds to a bunch of powerful moments with the parents, Sven, and Holle in every one of them. The specific honesty with which these are captured rescues the film from slipping into narratively jaded templates.
