Olivia Colman and John Lithgow Lead a Tender Family Drama About Love, Identity and Old Resentments
Olivia Colman takes on a deeply personal family story in Jimpa, a multi-generational comedy-drama that explores what happens when the version of the past a family has lived with for years is suddenly challenged.
Directed by Sophie Hyde, the filmmaker behind Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the semi-autobiographical drama brings Colman together with John Lithgow and Aud Mason-Hyde for a story spanning generations, identities and unresolved relationships.
Rather than relying on a conventional villain or a single explosive conflict, Jimpa focuses on a family forced to confront the complicated mixture of affection and resentment they have carried for decades.
A Visit to Amsterdam Reopens the Past
Colman plays Hannah, an Australian filmmaker who travels to Amsterdam with her husband and their non-binary teenager, Frances.
They are visiting Hannah’s estranged father Jim, affectionately known as “Jimpa,” played by Lithgow.
Years earlier, Jim came out as gay and left his family behind to build a radically different life in Europe. His decisions left Hannah with feelings about her childhood that have never entirely disappeared.
The delicate family dynamic becomes even more complicated when Frances develops a close connection with Jimpa and unexpectedly announces a desire to remain in Amsterdam with their grandfather for a year.
For Hannah, the possibility forces old memories and assumptions back to the surface.
Olivia Colman Faces a Complicated Father-Daughter Relationship
At the center of the film is the relationship between Hannah and Jimpa.
Colman brings vulnerability and restrained humor to a daughter attempting to reconcile the charismatic man Frances sees with the father she remembers from childhood.
Lithgow, meanwhile, portrays Jimpa as a free-spirited and unconventional grandfather whose warmth does not erase the consequences of decisions made years earlier.
As Hannah revisits the story she has long told herself about her family, she is forced to reconsider whether the past was as straightforward as she once believed.
That tension allows the film to examine how different generations can remember the same family history in dramatically different ways.
A Story With Deeply Personal Roots
The story is particularly personal for director Sophie Hyde.
Jimpa draws from elements of Hyde’s own family history, including her experience of her father coming out as gay when she was young.
That connection extends to the casting. Hyde’s own non-binary child, Aud Mason-Hyde, plays Frances, adding another autobiographical layer to the film’s exploration of family and identity.
Rather than treating those subjects as the basis for relentlessly heavy drama, Hyde mixes difficult conversations with humor, warmth and the energy of the film’s European setting.
More Than a Conventional Family Drama
Despite dealing with abandonment, resentment and unresolved childhood pain, Jimpa does not reduce its characters to simple heroes and villains.
Hannah must confront the hurt she still carries while also recognizing that Frances is developing an entirely different relationship with Jimpa.
The result is a story about the narratives families build around themselves — and what happens when a younger generation begins questioning them.
With Colman providing the emotional center and Lithgow portraying the larger-than-life grandfather at the heart of those conflicting memories, Jimpa approaches its difficult material with tenderness rather than easy answers.
Ultimately, the film is less interested in a dramatic family collapse than in whether people separated by decades of complicated history can finally understand one another — and whether understanding the past differently might offer them a way forward.
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