Your Sister's Sister

Synopsis: A year after his brother Tom’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) isn’t doing too well. His best friend Iris (Emily Blunt), who is also Tom’s ex-girlfriend, packs him off to her family’s holiday house to get his head straight. When he arrives he finds Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), Iris’s lesbian sister, already there and sorting out her own issues after being dumped by her partner. They get drunk, and complicate their relationship…

Before I get started - Google and watch a short film called The Dirty Garage. Welcome to mumblecore…

I despise mumblecore films. The bastard child of the Dogme manifesto, these dull efforts are full of ums, yeahs, and uh-huhs, with stumbling speeches about the complexities of character relationships often taking centre stage. Humpday, Shelton’s previous film, was a mumblecore comedy. And it was funny in concept, but halting and awkward in execution, with a cop-out ending that aspired to emotional revelation, but didn’t really get there.

Your Sister’s Sister is better than Humpday, I will give it that. And the first two thirds of the film are pretty good. At least it is once it gets past a fairly painful opening scene that feels a tad unrehearsed. Mark Duplass may be the godfather of mumblecore, but he is an entertaining actor, and as Jack and Hannah unload their baggage and get progressively drunker, it’s funny to watch the awkwardness give way to adolescent stupidity.

But then Iris turns up at the house, which is funny for a while, until the revelations start flying and the narrative hits a brick wall and spends the next twenty minutes boring you to death. The resolution to this boredom is a speech by Jack that feels like the table read of a first draft script at a writer’s workshop. It’s awful, excruciating to listen to, and embodies pretty much every reason I hate mumblecore since I think that it’s exactly the effect they were after.

Your Sister’s Sister is kinda good. It’s not actually good, because the film looks like it was filmed at the bottom of a muddy lake and the third act resolution is dire, but a crap ending and muddy lighting don’t take away from some very funny moments and a fairly awesome reveal that kicks off the aforementioned crap third act. There are some laughs, some nice touching moments, and it also has Emily Blunt, who is a charismatic actor. But it’s very uneven and the last twenty minutes are pretty bad. So be warned.

 

 

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