Family reunions are supposed to be moments of affection, ritual, and belonging. But cinema often reminds us that when people who share blood gather under the same roof, old wounds surface, alliances shift, and the familiar becomes uncanny.

These five films — from Mexico, Croatia, Iran, Denmark, and Spain — take the family gathering and turn it into a pressure cooker. Whether through celebration, mourning, or obligation, each story reveals how fragile domestic harmony can be, and how a single event can expose decades of silence, resentment, and unsaid truths.

Tótem (Mexico, 2023) – A Farewell Wrapped in Celebration

Lila Avilés’ Tótem revolves around a young girl navigating a chaotic day as her extended family prepares a birthday party that is also a silent farewell. What begins as a vibrant, noisy gathering becomes a mosaic of tenderness and denial. The film observes rituals — cooking, decorating, laughing — with a gentle, intimate camera, capturing how families unite around grief without naming it. In its small gestures and crowded rooms, Tótem reveals the beauty and cruelty of collective care.

The Uncle (Croatia, 2022) – Ritual as Control

In The Uncle, directors David Kapac and Andrija Mardešić twist the cozy Christmas gathering into a sinister performance. A family reenacts the same holiday routine each year to appease their domineering “uncle,” blurring the line between tradition and imprisonment. The film uses repetition, deadpan humor, and psychological dread to expose how family rituals can become systems of control. Domestic space becomes a stage where affection curdles into obedience.

Leila’s Brothers (Iran, 2022) – A Family Meeting in an Unraveling Country

Leila’s Brothers, by Saeed Roustaee, is built around constant family negotiations: siblings fighting over money, inheritance, loyalty, and survival in a collapsing economy. Every gathering — in cramped apartments, hospital hallways, shops — becomes a battlefield. Leila, fierce and determined, attempts to hold the family together while patriarchal structures and financial ruin threaten to pull everything apart. The result is a devastating portrait of a family meeting that never stops, because the crisis never ends.

The Celebration (Denmark, 1998) – The Dinner That Breaks a Legacy

Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (Festen), the first Dogme 95 film, turns a family dinner into a reckoning. What begins as a formal celebration for a patriarch’s birthday detonates when buried truths are forced into the open. Shot with grainy handheld realism, the film strips etiquette down to its brutal core: family as hierarchy, denial as tradition, silence as violence. Few films have captured the claustrophobia of family gatherings with such raw immediacy.

A House on Fire (Spain, 2024) – Domestic Space as a Fuse

In A House on Fire (La casa en llamas), Dani de la Torre brings a Spanish family together for what should be a peaceful reunion — only for unresolved conflicts, generational rifts, and long-suppressed grievances to ignite. The gathering becomes a catalyst for emotional combustion, where old roles no longer hold and the home itself feels ready to collapse. With its balance of tension, humor, and emotional honesty, the film shows how easily love can spark chaos when everyone is forced under the same roof.

Each film reveals a truth we instinctively know: family gatherings are rituals we enter not as blank slates, but as archives of our past selves. In these five stories parties become confrontations, traditions turn into traps, reunions expose fractures running beneath the surface and togetherness becomes an emotional X-ray.

What unites the films is not just conflict, but the recognition that families — with all their mess, tenderness, and contradictions — shape who we are, even when we try to step away.

These works remind us that the table we sit at, the rooms we gather in, and the people we avoid or cling to during these reunions often reveal more about us than any individual choice. In their chaos and beauty, these five films show that family gatherings are never simple — they are mirrors we cannot easily look away from.