Butterfly Jam

After the rigorously controlled Closeness and Beanpole, Kantemir Balagov returns with a film that is warmer, stranger and considerably less disciplined. His English-language debut, Butterfly Jam, relocates his fascination with displacement and inherited trauma to Newark, New Jersey, where a Circassian-American family attempts to preserve its identity while pursuing an increasingly elusive version of prosperity. The setting is more than an exotic backdrop: the family diner, with its harsh lighting, crowded kitchen and celebrated delens—traditional pies filled with potato and cheese—becomes a modest cultural refuge. It is where memories of another country survive through recipes, gestures and arguments, but also where economic frustration quietly ferments. Working with co-writer Marina Stepnova, Kantemir Balagov constructs a story about immigration without reducing it to a simple conflict between assimilation and tradition. His characters are caught somewhere less comfortable, belonging fully neither to the homeland they remember nor to the America in which they have built their lives.

At the centre is Temir, affectionately nicknamed Pyteh, a reserved sixteen-year-old wrestler played with remarkable sensitivity by newcomer Talha Akdogan. Temir possesses the discipline that the adults surrounding him conspicuously lack. His father Azik, portrayed by Barry Keoghan, is a gifted cook, an impulsive dreamer and an overgrown adolescent who treats parenthood as an extension of friendship. He loves his son sincerely, yet his idea of preparing him for manhood involves pushing him beyond his physical limits, boasting about his future Olympic career and arranging a catastrophically misguided sexual initiation after a wrestling victory. The irony is that Temir already appears more mature than his father. Barry Keoghan makes Azik exhausting without making him contemptible: beneath the swagger, restless movement and clownish schemes lies a frightened man who suspects that his child may eventually see through him. When Temir calls him weak, the insult reaches far deeper than either of them is equipped to acknowledge.

That inability to express affection without turning it into a contest gives the film its strongest dramatic language. Azik and his volatile friend Marat, played by Harry Melling, constantly shove, grapple and provoke one another, behaving like boys who have never learned where play ends and aggression begins. Their mock fights are affectionate until, abruptly, they are not. A refusal to back down becomes proof of courage; humiliation demands retaliation; tenderness must be disguised as noise. Marat is the most brittle expression of this masculinity, a would-be hustler whose foolish business ideas and hair-trigger pride conceal an acute fear of insignificance. Harry Melling sometimes pushes the character toward caricature, but his nervous hostility remains disturbingly credible. One can sense disaster forming not because these men are inherently cruel, but because their shared code offers them no graceful way to admit fear, defeat or dependence.

The film is at its best when it stops explaining and allows bodies, sounds and spaces to speak. Cinematographer Jomo Fray follows the characters with a roving camera that turns their disorderly lives into restless choreography, balancing the diner’s institutional glare against bruised pinks, oranges and nocturnal shadows. In one exhilarating sequence, Azik and Temir race along a street striking parked cars until alarms erupt around them. The flashing lights and overlapping sirens transform an act of childish vandalism into a private concert, a father and son briefly discovering a language they both understand. Another scene finds Azik dancing with his heavily pregnant sister Zalya in the kitchen, providing a few minutes of uncomplicated joy. Riley Keough brings an exhausted stillness to Zalya, communicating the burden of loving an unreliable brother even though the screenplay too often leaves her at the edge of a story whose women deserve far greater depth.

Butterfly Jam gradually ventures from social realism into folklore, most memorably through a rare pelican that Azik captures as an extravagant gift. The bird is funny, majestic and patently absurd—a fellow displaced creature whose presence seems to expose the human characters’ confusion. It also produces the kind of anecdote likely to outlive any synopsis: in a film filled with acclaimed performers, the pelican reportedly prompted one of the most enthusiastic reactions at its Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere. The title carries a similar mixture of playfulness and melancholy. Azik claims he can turn anything into jam, even butterflies, and the line becomes a fitting description of the film itself, which attempts to preserve fleeting beauty by crushing comedy, violence, grief and magical realism into the same jar. A late appearance by Monica Bellucci completes this movement toward cinematic fable, adding a knowingly improbable touch of grace rather than conventional realism.

The trouble is that the screenplay cannot always control these competing flavours. Several promising elements—including Temir’s tentative bond with fellow wrestler Alika, played with quiet assurance by Jaliyah Richards—remain underdeveloped, while other narrative turns are made deliberately elliptical without gaining much mystery from what has been withheld. The decisive eruption of violence has been announced from the opening, yet when it arrives it feels both horrifying and overly engineered, as though the characters have been manoeuvred into tragedy to complete the film’s argument about wounded male pride. The transition from intimate coming-of-age drama to crime-inflected melodrama is consequently more abrupt than devastating. Even the magical elements oscillate between inspired eccentricity and an overly convenient means of repairing emotions that the realistic narrative has shattered.

Yet the film’s unevenness should not be mistaken for emptiness. Kantemir Balagov remains a director of unusual visual confidence, and his sympathy for people living in a state of cultural and economic suspension is palpable. Most importantly, Talha Akdogan gives the film a steady emotional centre, moving between adolescent shyness, loyalty and dawning disappointment without advertising any of them. Temir’s real coming of age does not occur in the wrestling ring; it begins when he understands that loving a parent does not require inheriting his definition of strength. Butterfly Jam may be too meandering, too insistent in its symbolism and too hurried in resolving its tragedy, but its best moments possess a scruffy, startling tenderness. It is a flawed third feature, certainly, though also the work of a filmmaker willing to risk embarrassment in pursuit of something emotionally alive.

Butterfly Jam
Directed by Kantemir Balagov
Written by Kantemir Balagov, Marina Stepnova
Produced by Alexander Rodnyansky, Pascal Caucheteux
Starring Talha Akdogan, Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, Harry Melling, Jaliyah Richards
Cinematography: Jomo Fray
Edited by Kantemir Balagov, Juliette Welfling, Mathilde Chazaud
Music by Evgueni Galperine, Sacha Galperine
Production companies: AR Content, Why Not Productions
Distributed by Le Pacte (France)
Release dates: October 7, 2026 (France)
Running time: 97 minutes

Seen on 8 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre