Butterfly Jam

Much like his previous features Closeness and Beanpole, Kantemir Balagov’s arrestingly strange Butterfly Jam includes (at least) one moment that I’d 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.

It’s hardly the weirdest part of this sideways immigrant saga, which opens with a Circassian diner chef played by Barry Keoghan 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 flavour of a film that shares its lead actor’s penchant for mashing together different tastes and textures.

Butterfly Jam originally took place in Russia, but Balagov fled when Putin invaded Ukraine, and reimagined the screenplay as a conduit for his own immigrant anxieties.

– David Erlich, IndieWire