{"id":439706,"date":"2026-05-13T14:17:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T14:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/439706\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T14:17:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T14:17:10","slug":"butterfly-jam-review-barry-keoghan-leads-bizarre-coming-of-age-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/439706\/","title":{"rendered":"Butterfly Jam Review: Barry Keoghan Leads Bizarre Coming-of-Age Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much like his previous features \u201cCloseness<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBeanpole<\/a>,\u201d Kantemir Balagov\u2019s shambling but arrestingly strange \u201cButterfly Jam<\/a>\u201d includes (at least) one moment that I\u2019d never seen in a movie before. In this one, two Newark teenagers rub their naked spines together in an effort to cure a bad case of bacne while a wild pelican watches them from the corner of the room. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly the weirdest part of this sideways immigrant saga, which opens with a Circassian diner chef played by Barry Keoghan<\/a> serving his friends a delicious preserve made out of insects, and closes with a punchline that recasts the whole thing as a winking cosmic joke, but it stands out for how well it crystallizes the singular flavor of a film<\/a> that shares its lead actor\u2019s penchant for mashing together different tastes and textures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"CANNES,<\/a> \"'Wildwood'\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

To that point, \u201cButterfly Jam\u201d spends most of its first hour teasing us with a question that Balagov and co-writer Maria Stepnova only intend to answer by confusing its terms: Will the director\u2019s English-language debut \u2014 a project he\u2019s described as \u201ca masculine story told in pink\u201d \u2014 be sugary like the pastries that Azik (Keoghan) learned to make from his late parents, or sour like the air of frustrated violence that Azik\u2019s livewire friend Marat (the ever-chameleonic Harry Melling) brings with him into every room?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The truth, which is that it\u2019s both and neither all at once, only snaps into focus after something awful happens at the top of the third act. That\u2019s when the film threatens to resolve into the kind of tragic revenge drama that Sacha and Evgueni Galperine\u2019s ominous score has conditioned us to half-expect from the start. Knives are clutched, teeth are clenched, and a desperate Russian ex-pat yells loud enough for their long-dead ancestors to hear all the way back in the motherland.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet, it\u2019s only once \u201cButterfly Jam\u201d seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov\u2019s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it\u2019s been all along. It\u2019s only then, after shit has gone bad enough that the film seems like it\u2019s about to steer into self-parody, that this seemingly unclassifiable whatsit assumes its final form as a half-formed (and highly bizarre) fairy tale about the magic that\u2019s baked into even the most anguished of family histories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI am a fairy tale,\u201d Azik proudly declares to his 16-year-old son Temir (promising newcomer Talha Akdogan) at the start of the film, but it will be a while until the kid can appreciate what his dad could mean by that. A cauliflower-eared mumbler who became a father when he was still a child and now seems almost distressingly at peace with his life as the cook at a \u201cshithole\u201d diner (named after and run by his pregnant sister Zalya, played by Riley Keough), Azik has never been anybody\u2019s idea of a role model, and Temir \u2014\u00a0now old enough that people confuse the two men for brothers \u2014 is starting to realize as much.<\/p>\n

We gather that Azik taught his son everything he knows, but Temir \u2013 a kind-eyed wrestling star who\u2019s up for the state championship \u2014\u00a0has grown into a strength that makes his father seem weak by comparison. Balagov doesn\u2019t underline the characters\u2019 differing relationships to the old country, or to the culture that Azik brought with him to New Jersey when he immigrated there as a child (which is one of the many ways that \u201cButterfly Jam\u201d zags away from the stuff of a typical assimilation drama, even if the movie struggles for sensible ways of replacing those tropes). But at least on some level, Temir appears to believe that his dad is hobbled by his attachment to the past. That he\u2019s scared of asking for more from America.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Jomo Fray\u2019s shallow-focus cinematography \u2014 bathed in burnt orange sunlight and textured with an unromantic sense of infinite possibility \u2014 works to blur such Big Ideas into the background so that Balagov can draw our attention to the finer details of the film\u2019s setting. (\u201cButterfly Jam\u201d originally took place in Russia, but Balagov fled when Putin invaded Ukraine, and reimagined the screenplay as a conduit for his own immigrant anxieties.) There\u2019s a memorable scene, charged with intergenerational cringe, where Azik hires a local sex worker to devirginize his son, and another in which the two men admire their accomplishment after setting off every car alarm on a sleepy Newark block.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chatter about Azik\u2019s famous delens abounds, as does boastful talk about how Monica Bellucci\u2019s family hails from the same part of Nalchik. And while Marat and Zalya are largely sidelined by a script that struggles to find equilibrium among its mismatched parts, both evoke their own vivid sense of lived history. A tense introduction is all it takes for us to intuit the violent potential of Marat\u2019s internalized powerlessness (Melling, so convincingly subservient in last year\u2019s \u201cPillion,\u201d is every bit as believable as the feral nogoodnik he plays here), just as a weary sigh is all it takes for us to understand that Zalya has inherited all of the responsibilities that Azik has learned to avoid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now you might be thinking: Isn\u2019t it strange that such a richly specific portrait of Newark\u2019s Circassian community has been cast with an Irishman, a Brit, and Elvis Presley\u2019s granddaughter? Yes. Yes it is. They\u2019re all tremendous actors, and \u2014 at least to my non-Circassian eyes \u2014 there isn\u2019t a false note in any of their performances, but only Balagov could speak to that choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The best argument I can muster for it is that Keough, Keoghan, and Melling combine to fringe this story with the mishmash outsider quality that it seems to prize above all else; a quality that comes to assume an increasingly prominent role as \u201cButterfly Jam\u201d tries to blend its \u201cfound family\u201d ethos into a plot that\u2019s held together by blood. Will Temir, who seems more at home in this movie than anyone else, mature to appreciate that strength is not the same thing as power, and that ambition is not the same thing as success? Of course, but he\u2019s lost too much faith in his father to learn that lesson from Azik alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To take pride in his origins, or at least to arrive at the vaguely poignant (and jarringly upbeat) endpoint where Balagov leaves him at the end of this story, Temir will have to spread his wings even further afield of the Circassian community. He will have to forsake brutality in favor of the uncertain kinship he develops with a fellow wrestler named Alika (Jaliyah Richards), to say nothing of the adopted pelican who quizzically watches them rub their backs together one afternoon. \u201cI can make a jam out of anything,\u201d Azik insists, and, in lieu of a clearer moral, this movie leaves us with the feeling that his son has inherited the same gift. If only what Balagov allows him to make with it were slightly easier to swallow.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cButterfly Jam\u201d premiered at the 2026 Cannes<\/a> Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much like his previous features \u201cCloseness\u201d and \u201cBeanpole,\u201d Kantemir Balagov\u2019s shambling but arrestingly strange \u201cButterfly Jam\u201d includes (at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[206016,27993,146,878,85,46,397,1530],"class_list":["post-439706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-butterfly-jam","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}