“Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,” intones the eponymous hero of Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, about a New York City hit man who has styled himself as a sort of time-warped expatriate of feudal Japan. He lives humbly among his pigeons and under the dual sign of the I Ching and the Wu-Tang, wielding katana and karma alike as precision instruments. Study Jim Jarmusch’s blade and you’ll find that he also likes to cut things fine, rhythmically and philosophically, to the point that his meticulously oscillating movies sometimes barely seem to penetrate his own consciousness, much less the spectator’s.

This is not a put-down: Among the contemporary American filmmakers who might be best categorized as conceptualists—or plausibly proffered up as poets—Jarmusch is surely the gentlest, a surgeon who doubles as his own anesthesiologist. The old cliché that a certain kind of movie—slow, contemplative, and probably not starring The Rock—manifests as a “meditation” on its theme actually applies in Jarmusch’s case, with his love for koans and incantations, be they stilted, sotto voce, or gloriously full-throated. Recall the compulsive needle drops of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” in 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, a laconic, bohemian comedy of manners that doubled as the first, and arguably still the most charming, iteration of Jarmusch’s particular sort of sorcery.

The seeming sleepiness of a movie like Jarmusch’s new and prize-winning triptych Father Mother Sister Brother is deceptive and also instructive. The film’s selection as the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival over more superficially bold—and overtly topical—art house fare like Bugonia, No Other Choice, or The Voice of Hind Rajab was seen in some quarters as puzzling (or perhaps as a sign of jury president Alexander Payne’s parochial—i.e., American—taste). But there’s something to be said for art that swaps out sensory overload for a more subliminal sort of programming. The effect of Father Mother Sister Brother’s three vignettes—each about 35 minutes long, and each concerning a family whose members are unhappy in their own ways—is simultaneously surreal and recognizable, in a way that intensifies, rather than deadens, our identification. To paraphrase our old pal Ghost Dog, who places stock in the idea that life is but a dream, the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

The opening sequence of Father Mother Sister........

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