Your Sister’s Sister
With her latest film, Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton again teams up with Mark Duplass, who plays Jack, an affable slacker caught between two sisters, Iris (Emily Blunt) and Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) in this lightly drawn but well-executed tale. Shelton has a knack for putting average people into beyond-average situations, as she did with Duplass and Josh Leonard in her last film, Humpday, which had the hook of two long-time best friends who get caught up in a drunken bet to have guy-on-guy sex on film for the sake of making a porno to enter in The Stranger’s annual Humpday competition.
This time around, Shelton’s hook is that Jack is in love with Iris, whose ex-boyfriend was Jack’s now-deceased brother. Jack’s having trouble coping with the loss of his brother and needs some mental space, so Iris offers him — or rather insists that the accept — the use of her parents’ island getaway house. When he gets there, he finds the house already occupied by Iris’s lesbian half-sister, Hannah, who’s come to the house to nurse her own wounds over the recent breakup of a long-term relationship. And confusion, awkwardness and occasional hilarity ensue.
Shelton handles her triad of characters with a sure hand, smoothly guiding them, and us through Jack’s relationships with both Iris and Hannah, and theirs with each other, as they navigate the rocky road of where this island getaway vacation takes them. As with Humpday, Shelton’s made a film that’s warm, heartfelt and accessible, with characters who feel like the kind of people you might actually have in your own life.
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