Your Sister’s Sister opens on a memorial ceremony that’s commemorating the one year anniversary of the death of a character we never meet, but who’s presence lingers over the entire film. He’s said to have been a great man— the most selfless, the most generous, the most full of life—according all who attend the party. All save his brother Jack (Mark Duplass). Jack says that things are much more complicated than that, and that the reality of who his brother was is less rosy, but also way more complex and beautiful than anyone in the room is willing to admit or able to articulate. His viewpoint of who his brother truly was is given to us in a drunken, aggressive, hilarious monologue that centers heavily around the movie The Revenge of the Nerds, and that makes everyone in the room extremely uncomfortable. Pretty instantly two things are clear: Jack has been profoundly broken up over the death of his brother, and Your Sister’s Sister is going to be an interesting and entertaining filmgoing experience.
The dead brother’s ex-girlfriend and Jack’s current best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt), takes the public outburst as an opportunity to stage an intervention, send Jack on a trip to her family’s vacation home on a remote Northwestern island, and hopefully give him a quiet space where he can get his head together and decide where his life is going. That’s the plan at least. A wrinkle occurs when Jack gets to the house and finds that Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) is already squatting there, working through some pretty serious life issues herself. Some casual chit chat, a bottle of tequila, and one bad decision later, and Jack and Hannah find themselves in bed together, having some impressively awkward drunk sex. The situation isn’t something to look back and laugh at, because things get made super weird by Iris’ unannounced visit the next day. You see, Jack might be in love with Iris, or she might be in love with him, or maybe their friendship might just be so deep and true that they don’t know how to quantify it. There’s the question of the dead brother. It’d be weird if they got together after Iris was already with him, wouldn’t it? And now that Jack has been with Hannah, that makes things even stranger. Or does it just make them even? Look, things are complicated, and they get even more complicated over the course of a long weekend.
Your Sister’s Sister was written and directed by Lynn Shelton, who’s 2009 film Humpday is often cited as being one of the quintessential examples of the Mumblecore film movement that’s sprung up over the last decade; so it should come as no surprise that it tells a very small story that’s about getting to know a few characters and then putting them in conflict with one another. The focus here is on the performances, the dialogue, and the smattering of humor that gets injected into the proceedings throughout. And, in those regards, the film is largely a success.
Admittedly, there are some slight issues with the dialogue that crop up in a scene or two. If you’re going to make a movie about people sitting around a house talking, you better give them some interesting things to say, and generally Shelton does. But sometimes the characters’ interactions can become so cutesy, so painfully clever, that maintaining any suspension of disbelief that these are real people talking exclusively about insightful things solely in a patchwork of quippy quotables becomes impossible. Essentially, the dialogue can feel overwritten, and sometimes that takes you out of the film. Given Shelton’s past work and Duplass’ history making movies that are heavily improvised, I was expecting and would have welcomed a bit more naturalism.
That’s not to say that all of the cutesy cleverness isn’t actually funny though. It is. One of Your Sister’s Sister’s strengths overall is that it manages to be consistently funny over the course of its entire runtime. Even the awkward sex scene was enjoyable, and most of the time awkward sex scenes come off as being unnecessary attempts at making lazy humor. Not only was this one integral enough to the plot that its inclusion didn’t feel exploitive, but it’s also a scene that becomes funnier as you learn more about the characters and then look back on it.
Despite the handful of instances where the actors weren’t quite selling the dialogue, the performances here are all really strong overall. Duplass surprised me with how big he went with some of his delivery, considering he was playing a down-in-the-dumps character. Here’s a story that’s pretty exclusively grounded, relationship drama stuff, and Duplass is playing things big, like a vaudeville actor or a silent film star. Whenever the two ladies trade dialogue back and forth you can always rest assured that he’s going to be in the background, reacting to it all with his face and getting big laughs from what generally qualifies as clowning. On paper what he does in this film shouldn’t have worked, but somehow he’s able to pull it off, and that has to say something about the power of the screen presence he brings to the table.
Emily Blunt is just radiantly beautiful; so much so that it feels kind of jarring when you see her stuck into an indie comedy like this or The Five-Year Engagement. She’s just so statuesque, so ethereal a creature that it’s hard to see her as the regular girl going through some romantic drama with her schlubby best friend. The unattainable girl that our protagonist has to learn he can never have? Yeah, I could see her doing that. The glamorous secret agent jet setting around the world and being fabulous? Sure, that makes sense too. But her dealing with regular people problems while living amongst regular people is hard to swallow. She has to work extra hard to get you to buy into her presence in Jack and his late brother’s life, but after you watch her share private moments with Duplass and DeWitt it becomes crystal clear that she’s able to pull it off. There’s an authenticity to some of the quiet moments in this film that’s a true revelation, and Blunt’s work is largely responsible.
DeWitt is a performer who I wasn’t terribly familiar with going into this film, but I left it confident in my decision to become a fan. She’s completely charming in an overwhelming way, and she manages to make you like, nay, love a character who’s written to be a bit of a pain in the ass and something of a psycho. I don’t want to give away any of the secrets of what goes down between this trio over the course of the film’s long weekend, but I’ll just say that none of it looks too flattering for the character of Hannah. She’s got some grating personality traits that should have been a turn off, she makes some terrible decisions that compel you to take her by the shoulders and shake her, but since DeWitt is just so inherently likable you stick with the character and you care about what happens to her. In another actress’ hands Hannah could have been written off as a villain, which would have been a serious hurdle in front of this film’s success.
That hurdle isn’t there though, and the movie does indeed succeed. It’s an insightful and entertaining look at intimacy in all of its forms. It explores romantic and familial relationships in order to comment on what it means to be truly close to someone. All you need to know about these characters—and, by extension, humans—can be learned by paying attention to the different ways that they share food, or share sleeping quarters. This is basic, animal stuff, but it cuts to the heart of who we are and what’s important to us. The relationships in this movie feel real, the outcome of the characters’ squabbles feels dire, and by the end of the film you become so invested in their lives that one or two of the big emotional monologues just so happened to take place concurrently with me randomly getting something in my eye. When you go to the cheesy monologue scene and you’ve got the eyes on your movie tearing up rather than rolling, you can rest assured that you’ve created something worth watching. With Your Sister’s Sister, Lynn Shelton has done just that.
