Barry Keoghan Plays a Lovable Mess in ‘Butterfly Jam’

Barry Keoghan has made a career out of playing men you probably shouldn’t trust but can’t stop watching. In Butterfly Jam, Kantemir Balagov’s long-awaited third feature and English-language debut, that quality gets a full workout — and the results are as maddening and magnetic as you’d expect.

The film opened the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes 2026 to a reception that could generously be called complicated. Critics largely agree that Balagov’s formal gifts are extraordinary, that Keoghan is doing something genuinely interesting, and that the whole thing is about 20 minutes too committed to its own gorgeous aimlessness. Whether that’s a dealbreaker depends entirely on your patience for movies that operate on feel rather than plot.

A Diner, a Delen, and a Very Bad Dad

Set inside Newark’s small, insular Circassian-American community — a diaspora rarely seen on screen — Butterfly Jam centers on Azik (Keoghan), a cauliflower-eared line cook at his family’s diner who is, by most measures, a disaster. He’s a single father to 16-year-old Temir (newcomer Talha Akdogan), a gifted high school wrestler who is already more responsible than his dad. He’s the younger sibling to Zalya (Riley Keough), the heavily pregnant, bone-tired woman who actually keeps the diner running. And he’s best friends with Marat (Harry Melling), a volatile, wannabe-tough-guy whose greatest business venture involves a secondhand candyfloss machine.

Azik’s one real skill — and the film makes sure you know it — is his delen, a traditional Circassian fried flatbread stuffed with potato and cheese. When a prosperous cousin announces plans to open a high-end restaurant in Newark and becomes obsessed with Azik’s cooking, it briefly looks like our man might actually get somewhere. He won’t. But watching him try is, for a while, genuinely charming.

Keoghan plays Azik with a scrappy, stumbling exuberance — think Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy from Mean Streets if Johnny Boy somehow had a kid and kept going. There’s a melancholy under-achievement baked into every scene, a man who boasts that he can “make a jam out of anything” while consistently making a mess of everything. He takes his son to see a sex worker as a reward for winning a wrestling match. He kidnaps a pelican from the beach to cheer up his pregnant sister. He describes himself to Temir, entirely seriously, as “a fairy tale.”

It is, as one reviewer put it, a film that describes itself as “a masculine story told in pink” — and that tonal contradiction is either its greatest strength or its central problem, depending on where you sit.

What the Critics Are Saying

Across the board, Balagov’s craft gets nothing but respect. Cinematographer Jomo Fray — fresh off Nickel Boys — shoots Newark in burnt oranges and dusky pinks, alternating between stately amber-hued compositions and urgent handheld work that keeps the film’s restless energy alive even when the story stalls. The score from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine layers unplaceable synthetic textures against breathy human sounds, consistently unsettling in the best way.

One scene in particular has drawn unanimous admiration: Azik and Temir roam a quiet Newark block setting off every car alarm in succession, the resulting symphony of light and noise becoming something like a protest — two overlooked people demanding the world notice them. It’s the kind of image that sticks with you long after the credits.

But the script, co-written with Marina Stepnova, is where things get thornier. The film opens with a flash-forward to Temir announcing his father’s death, then immediately pulls the rug out, rewinding to Azik in something close to peak form. From there it freewheels through a series of anecdotal set pieces — the delen, the pelican, the prostitute, a violent incident around the hour mark that shifts the entire register — without ever quite committing to what kind of story it wants to tell. Is it a father-son drama? An immigrant displacement saga? A character study of a profoundly eccentric man? Balagov and Stepnova seem to want all three, and the seams show.

Variety called it “agreeably shaggy” and praised Balagov’s “unsentimental kinship” with his characters, while noting the story “sometimes unfolds with less conviction and credibility.” Deadline found it ultimately “floundering in its last half-hour,” pointing to a third act that dissolves into “an explosion of baffling non-sequiturs.” IndieWire was the most generous, arguing the film earns its strangeness as “a bittersweet fable” and a “half-formed fairy tale about the magic baked into even the most anguished of family histories” — though even that reading came with a caveat that the ending is “slightly difficult to swallow.”

The Casting Question Nobody Can Quite Resolve

An Irish actor, a British actor, and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter playing Circassian-Americans. It’s a choice that multiple reviewers flagged and none could fully explain away — though most landed on a version of “it works anyway.”

Keough, in particular, brings a quiet weight to Zalya that makes the character’s exhaustion feel completely real, even if the script gives her less to do than she deserves. Melling, who was so convincingly subservient in last year’s Pillion, is equally convincing here as a man whose internalized powerlessness is just one bad night away from something terrible. And Keoghan — who played a similarly reckless dadchild in Andrea Arnold’s Bird — brings the kind of strange, rolling physicality that makes even his most absurd choices feel oddly plausible.

The real revelation, though, may be Talha Akdogan as Temir. The young newcomer anchors the film’s emotional core with a performance that captures the particular misery of being the adult in a relationship with your own parent — a kid alternating between recessive adolescent awkwardness and quiet, devastating clarity. “You’re weak,” he tells his father at one point, and the line lands because Akdogan makes you feel exactly how long Temir has been sitting on it.

The Bigger Picture

What makes Butterfly Jam worth engaging with — frustrations and all — is the context Balagov brings to it. The film was originally conceived in his North Caucasus hometown of Nalchik before his public condemnation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine forced him into exile in the U.S. The Newark Circassian community, a real and largely invisible diaspora descended from a territory conquered by Russia, became the vehicle for his own immigrant anxieties. There’s nothing heavy-handed about it — Balagov doesn’t underline the political subtext — but it gives the film’s portrait of people who are perpetually not-quite-settled a resonance that a more conventional immigrant drama might have spelled out too loudly.

Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole is widely considered a masterpiece, and the shadow of that film hangs over Butterfly Jam in ways that are both inevitable and a little unfair. This is a looser, stranger, more deliberately frustrating film — one that operates on musical logic, as The Wrap noted, “establishing an unusual register, settling into an uncommon groove, then simply riffing within it.” If you’re looking for the disciplined tragedy of Beanpole, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a filmmaker of genuine, restless talent doing something genuinely risky — and a cast committed enough to follow him wherever he goes, even when the destination turns out to be a Newark diner where a man is proudly serving his friends jam made from butterflies.

Butterfly Jam premiered at Cannes 2026 and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.