Much like his previous features “Closeness” and “Beanpole,” Kantemir Balagov’s shambling but 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 flavor of a film that shares its lead actor’s penchant for mashing together different tastes and textures.
To that point, “Butterfly Jam” spends most of its first hour teasing us with a question that Balagov and co-writer Maria Stepnova only intend to answer by confusing its terms: Will the director’s English-language debut — a project he’s described as “a masculine story told in pink” — be sugary like the pastries that Azik (Keoghan) learned to make from his late parents, or sour like the air of frustrated violence that Azik’s livewire friend Marat (the ever-chameleonic Harry Melling) brings with him into every room?
The truth, which is that it’s both and neither all at once, only snaps into focus after something awful happens at the top of the third act. That’s when the film threatens to resolve into the kind of tragic revenge drama that Sacha and Evgueni Galperine’s ominous score has conditioned us to half-expect from the start. Knives are clutched, teeth are clenched, and a desperate Russian ex-pat yells loud enough for their long-dead ancestors to hear all the way back in the motherland.
And yet, it’s only once “Butterfly Jam” seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along. It’s only then, after shit has gone bad enough that the film seems like it’s about to steer into self-parody, that this seemingly unclassifiable whatsit assumes its final form as a half-formed (and highly bizarre) fairy tale about the magic that’s baked into even the most anguished of family histories.
“I am a fairy tale,” Azik proudly declares to his 16-year-old son Temir (promising newcomer Talha Akdogan) at the start of the film, but it will be a while until the kid can appreciate what his dad could mean by that. A cauliflower-eared mumbler who became a father when he was still a child and now seems almost distressingly at peace with his life as the cook at a “shithole” diner (named after and run by his pregnant sister Zalya, played by Riley Keough), Azik has never been anybody’s idea of a role model, and Temir — now old enough that people confuse the two men for brothers — is starting to realize as much.
We gather that Azik taught his son everything he knows, but Temir – a kind-eyed wrestling star who’s up for the state championship — has grown into a strength that makes his father seem weak by comparison. Balagov doesn’t underline the characters’ differing relationships to the old country, or to the culture that Azik brought with him to New Jersey when he immigrated there as a child (which is one of the many ways that “Butterfly Jam” zags away from the stuff of a typical assimilation drama, even if the movie struggles for sensible ways of replacing those tropes). But at least on some level, Temir appears to believe that his dad is hobbled by his attachment to the past. That he’s scared of asking for more from America.
But Jomo Fray’s shallow-focus cinematography — bathed in burnt orange sunlight and textured with an unromantic sense of infinite possibility — works to blur such Big Ideas into the background so that Balagov can draw our attention to the finer details of the film’s setting. (“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.) There’s a memorable scene, charged with intergenerational cringe, where Azik hires a local sex worker to devirginize his son, and another in which the two men admire their accomplishment after setting off every car alarm on a sleepy Newark block.
Chatter about Azik’s famous delens abounds, as does boastful talk about how Monica Bellucci’s family hails from the same part of Nalchik. And while Marat and Zalya are largely sidelined by a script that struggles to find equilibrium among its mismatched parts, both evoke their own vivid sense of lived history. A tense introduction is all it takes for us to intuit the violent potential of Marat’s internalized powerlessness (Melling, so convincingly subservient in last year’s “Pillion,” is every bit as believable as the feral nogoodnik he plays here), just as a weary sigh is all it takes for us to understand that Zalya has inherited all of the responsibilities that Azik has learned to avoid.
Now you might be thinking: Isn’t it strange that such a richly specific portrait of Newark’s Circassian community has been cast with an Irishman, a Brit, and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter? Yes. Yes it is. They’re all tremendous actors, and — at least to my non-Circassian eyes — there isn’t a false note in any of their performances, but only Balagov could speak to that choice.
The best argument I can muster for it is that Keough, Keoghan, and Melling combine to fringe this story with the mishmash outsider quality that it seems to prize above all else; a quality that comes to assume an increasingly prominent role as “Butterfly Jam” tries to blend its “found family” ethos into a plot that’s held together by blood. Will Temir, who seems more at home in this movie than anyone else, mature to appreciate that strength is not the same thing as power, and that ambition is not the same thing as success? Of course, but he’s lost too much faith in his father to learn that lesson from Azik alone.
To take pride in his origins, or at least to arrive at the vaguely poignant (and jarringly upbeat) endpoint where Balagov leaves him at the end of this story, Temir will have to spread his wings even further afield of the Circassian community. He will have to forsake brutality in favor of the uncertain kinship he develops with a fellow wrestler named Alika (Jaliyah Richards), to say nothing of the adopted pelican who quizzically watches them rub their backs together one afternoon. “I can make a jam out of anything,” Azik insists, and, in lieu of a clearer moral, this movie leaves us with the feeling that his son has inherited the same gift. If only what Balagov allows him to make with it were slightly easier to swallow.
Grade: B-
“Butterfly Jam” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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