‘Butterfly Jam’ review: Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough and Harry Melling star in unconvincing Cannes Directors Fortnight opener

Dir. Kantemir Balagov. France 2026. 102mins

The cinema of exile and displacement can often yield extraordinary results, especially when circumstances oblige filmmakers to find new ways of representing their own identity. That hasn’t quite worked out for Kantemir Balagov, a Russian director from Kabardino-Balkaria in the North Caucasus, who made a powerful impression with 2017 debut Closeness, set in his own homeland, and Beanpole, a female-centred drama about 1945 Leningrad. His third feature, the English-language Butterfly Jam, retains Kabardian, or Circassian, elements, this time in a New Jersey setting. But an uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness 

The high-profile presence of Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough and Harry Melling – the later riding high after Pillion–  should ensure this French production visibility on the art-house circuit following its premiere as the opening film of Cannes Directors Fortnight. But while the elements and the conviction may be there, this jam frustratingly refuses to gel.

Balagov originally intended the film to be set in Russia, and wrote the screenplay there, but was forced to leave the country when the war on Ukraine began. He reworked the story when he discovered that there was a Karbadian community in New Jersey, and made Newark the setting. Here, 16-year-old Temir (newcomer Talha Akdogan), who is nicknamed Pyteh or ‘Little One’, is a promising high school wrestler whose father Azik (Keoghan) is a cook specialising in delens, a traditional Karbadian pie – and seemingly the staple that sustains the diner Azik runs with older sister Zayla (Keough).

Temir reveres his dad, a free-wheeling tale-spinner who claims he can make jam out of anything, even butterflies, but who is also prone to get up to reckless mischief, especially in the company of his friend Marat (Melling). Away from the claustrophobic, very male environment dominated by these two, Temir befriends a young Black woman from his class, Alika (Jaliyah Richards), whose sensitivity threatens to hamper her wrestling talent.

Much of the film has a free-wheeling, seemingly part-improvised feel, with Keoghan, Melling and others exchanging tough-guy badinage that can’t quite shake off the second-hand ring of Mean Streets, with Azik and Marat taking turns to be the mercurial Johnny Boy figure (especially with Melling sporting a ratty ‘tache that echoes certain early De Niro roles). A somewhat sketchy, fragmented narrative involves Azik hustling for a chef gig from a lawyer turned restauranteur; and Azik’s theft of a pelican as a gift for the pregnant Zalya (whose partner is absent somewhere, in circumstances never made clear).

This is very much a performance film, and the player who emerges most strongly is young Akdogan – simply because he’s so believably natural, with his easy, gentle but robust openness. Keoghan, on the other hand, plays close to roles we’ve seen him in before (e.g. in Andrea Arnold’s Bird) and, compelling as he is here, he doesn’t quite find a new register to explore. And, at 33, he still looks that bit too boyish to convince as a teenager’s dad. 

Melling, conversely, extends his familiar range, although his characterisation feels a little generic and he goes wildly and distractingly full-tilt towards the end as Balagov lets the melodrama take hold. Keough, meanwhile, is sober and controlled – but somewhat sidelined – as an embodiment of domestic conscience and sanity.

What we barely get, however – culinary and other folkloric references apart – is any real sense of a Circassian community. The actors speak the occasional phrase in the Circassian language, but by and large sound 100 percent American; so much so that Butterfly Jam feels as if it could be about almost any diasporic community in the US (a scene with a comically hyperbolic funeral orator is one of the few rare touches of specificity.)

Butterfly Jam’s several threads and settings – home, diner, wrestling ring – never quite knit, with the teenagers’ relationship only properly allowed to breathe towards the end, while certain scenes and time jumps feel jarringly abrupt. There are startling shifts of tone, the buffoonish horseplay culminating in a shockingly brutal, albeit not graphic, act of violence. That intensity is offset not altogether convincingly by borderline magic-realist touches (the pelican, a routine with multiple car alarms) and an ill-advisedly cutesy celebrity cameo.

There’s definitely a visual signature at work here, though, with DoP Jomo Fray (Nickel Boys, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) shooting tightly framed but loosely blocked confrontation scenes, and giving interiors distinctive tints of pink, redolent of fruits, jam and candy floss.