YOUR SISTER'S SISTER

M, 90 min

Directed by Lynn Harvey.

Starring Emily Blunt, Mark Duplass, Rosemarie DeWitt.

It starts well enough. Mark Duplass' character Jack makes an utter arse of himself at his own brother's memorial service.

The brother has been dead a year, but amid all the tearful platitudes, Jack wants everyone to know that he wasn't always such an angel. And you can imagine how well that goes down with the achingly well-mannered and hip Seattle crowd who were the brother's best friends.

Among these people - who look as though they are eternally on their way to a Bon Iver gig - Jack is a pudgy, abrasive, and self-loathing presence.

Clearly an intervention is called for, and arrives in the shape of Emily Blunt's Iris, once a prospective sister-in-law, now just a slightly cloying and self-righteous platonic bestie to Jack.

Jack is dispatched to Iris' dad's house on some mist-bound isle to consider the error of his ways and get his guano together in a manner that Iris and co will find acceptable. But things go way off-plan when Jack arrives at the house, expecting to be alone, only to find himself shooting tequila and then hitting the sack with Iris' older and hitherto gay sister Hanna.

In the morning Iris turns up, intent on declaring her feelings to Jack. Talking ensues.  Boy does it ensue. And ensue. These people have feelings, and emotions, and things they refer to as ''needs'', but which any sane person would describe as ''wants''. 

Your Sister's Sister is a three-hander, largely improvised, and mostly set within one very beautiful lake house. Of the three, I found chubby, drunken, self-destructive Jack to be the only sympathetic character. But, as convention demands, Jack must also ''get in touch with himself'', and lose whatever individuality he had.

This is a film in which one interesting thing happens, and then everyone sits around and talks about it. If you're still a Bon Iver fan, it'll probably qualify as a date movie.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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