Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 27 February

Your Sister’s Sister (Shelton, 2011)

The passing of dir­ect­or Lynn Shelton in May 2020 – at the age of only 54 – was such a shock.

She was reach­ing her prime as a film­maker with Sword of Trust in cinemas a year earli­er, TV cred­its includ­ing epis­odes of GLOW, The Morning Show and Little Fires Everywhere, as well as dir­ect­ing her part­ner Marc Maron’s superb stan­dup show for Netflix, End Times Fun in 2020.

Your Sister’s Sister is a superb example of her del­ic­ate but funny craft and I reviewed it for Capital Times back in 2012:

Your Sister’s Sister is a lovely little film for a big screen, an intim­ate three-hander fea­tur­ing shift­ing rela­tion­ships, secrets revealed and a warmth and gen­er­os­ity towards its char­ac­ters that con­tin­ues to cap­tiv­ate even when it is test­ing them.

Mark Duplass’s Jack has been depressed and bit­ter since the death of his broth­er and best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) offers him her fam­ily cab­in for a few weeks so he can sort him­self out. What she doesn’t know is that her sis­ter, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), has also chosen to use the cab­in to get over her own recent romantic breakup.

Refer a friend

Jack’s arrival sur­prises Hannah but they both get over it fairly quickly with the help of a bottle of tequila and some alcohol-encouraged mutu­al attrac­tion. When Iris arrives the next day to check on things they agree to keep their drunk­en tryst a secret but – as they should in any well-plotted com­edy – their lies grow until they are basic­ally unsus­tain­able and push – as they say – must come to shove.

Writer-director Lynn Shelton has a knack for this sort of intim­ate dilemma-driven drama. I loved Humpday (which also fea­tured schlubby every­man Duplass) when it screened in the fest­iv­al in 2009, but this film takes her hand­made, mumble­core, impro­vised style and adds a few big screen aes­thet­ics. It actu­ally feels like an eleg­antly scrip­ted and care­fully con­struc­ted item and the only way that a largely impro­vised pro­cess can work that well is when the bones are really good to start with (apart from a fairly exten­ded but prob­ably neces­sary explan­a­tion of why Blunt has a British accent and her sis­ter doesn’t).

Also reviewed that week were the Sarkies’ broth­ers Kiwi black com­edy Two Little Boys (aka Deano and Nige’s Best Last Day Ever) and the Scandi-thriller Jo Nesbø’s Jackpot.

Where to watch Your Sister’s Sister

Aotearoa: Streaming on Māori+ (free with ads) or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Stan

Canada: Streaming on AMC+ and SundanceNow

USA: Streaming on AMC+, Paramount+ and Fubo

UK: Streaming on SundanceNow

Further listening

You can listen to last Friday’s Short-Cuts ses­sion on RNZ Nights here, that’s me chat­ting with fill-in host Todd Zaner. I cov­er The Zone of Interest and Drive-Away Dolls (in cinemas), Orion and the Dark on Netflix and TVNZ+ pick­ing up the clas­sic TV series Freaks & Geeks.

Seeing Two Little Boys pop back into my con­scious­ness, I recall the inter­view we did with Robert and Duncan Sarkies for the old Cinematica pod­cast. I’ve archived all of the epis­odes here and some­times won­der wheth­er I should be recre­at­ing a pod­cast feed for all those aban­doned epis­odes so that they might be found more easily.