Something Familiar (2026) ‘CPH: DOX’ Documentary Review: A Prickly Unravelling of Secrets and Lies

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Rachel Taparjan’s documentary “Something Familiar” (2026) maps deep, bristling emotional wounds across the contours of family and time. There’s a heaving sense of trauma, grief, and abandonment. How do shattered souls find their way back to a semblance of emotional stability? The women bear these heavy scars, threaded intimately with family history. Some parents have evaded duty and foisted children into depressing, punishing situations.

The film takes stock of the sheer pain that crisscrosses their lives and destiny, the raft of questions that grind and thrust upon the daughters. There are so many stories to unravel, truths to mine that have long been stacked away. To discover elemental truths about one’s roots is to be met with inevitable disappointment, despair, and heartache. One hosts certain perceptions that shift, realign, and disrupt in the wake of fresh knowledge. In a poignant later moment, this realisation finds utterance as losses spew when one finally encounters those long-sought ties. Suddenly, the ground beneath the feet dislodges and gives way to trenches of utter rejection.

The film opens with the dissolution of a former life. A Cleveland couple adopted Rachel from an orphanage in Romania, and it ushered them into a new lease of life, given that they had recently lost their own 13-year-old daughter. Joy returned to the couple’s lives, but there were frays once Rachel grew up. Then, another woman from the same orphanage, Mihaela, requests that Rachel discover her birth family. What ensues are devastating encounters and findings. Either woman wrestles with their identity as being adopted. Wading through the bramble of paternity becomes a humbling experience, suffused with anguish aplenty.

“Something Familiar” grapples with the mesh of these difficult, unwieldy, and emotionally fraught reckonings as old biological connections are rekindled. The questions Mihaela and Rachel are asked are abrasive. It calls for their hearts to be battered again and again. There’s immense vulnerability required, a project that can leave them emotionally shorn and utterly depleted.

But both recognise the urgency of going down the road for answers, no matter the brutal shape those might form. Childhood truth morphs into something more morbid and wrenching when cast under the shade of adult crises. The dilemmas parents had to battle, leading to tough decisions, are exposed, and their grown-up children sift through the detritus of being left behind.

Something Familiar (2026) — A still from “Something Familiar” (2026)

One expects one thing only to stumble across far more misshapen actuality. Shelling through lies and denial and hiding, one is ambushed by unflattering truths where parents reveal themselves to be way stranger and not so loving. In such times, comfort materialises in a sister one never had the privilege of knowing. What connects is a shared trauma, a familiarity with the obdurate pain of not having a solid anchorage of family.

The film staggers through the messy terrain of familial discoveries, the unrelenting torment of secrets encased deep within identity, family reckonings that have largely been removed from conversations. Both Mihaela and Rachel are unprepared for the spate of terrible epiphanies. One forges their sense of self based on certain, pre-existing narratives. What happens when those are discredited and proven to be fabricated? How does one reconfigure oneself amidst such a dramatic shift? It can take a lifetime to process.

One is left wishing they hadn’t bothered to go digging up the past. The partner of Mihaela’s mother denies any awareness of them. But the lies are starkly clear. Rachel’s birth parents had passed, but she reunites with her biological sister, who uncovers disturbing truths about their mother. A few sections have Rachel making several women step in for her absent mother. Rachel admits to not being angry at her. Then comes the sore reminder that, in order to be angry at her mother, she must have known her first. No such connection even got a chance.

“Something Familiar” dives through unnerving reality, chipping away at facades and throwing up stories and anecdotes one would rather turn away from. One needs strength of will and heart to power through such twisting discoveries. When ideals and familiar notions break down, what else can one clutch onto? The film reminds us that not all journeys of self-discovery may end up on a positive, affirmative note. The beauty and hardship of life is in squaring to face both unexpected, nourishing intimacies, as Rachel finds in her sister, and the seamier sides that arrive like a gut punch. Rachel Taparjan has woven a deeply honest work that gets gruelling but always holds space for rich complexity in thorny decisions.