Review: Your Sister’s Sister (15)

A drunken one-night stand is the catalyst for much soul-searching in Lynn Shelton’s improvised hybrid of sibling rivalry and love triangle.
By Tony Earnshaw
Published 29th Jun 2012, 12:17 BST

Mourning his brother, Jack (Mark Duplass) accepts his best friend Iris’s offer to sequester himself away in her family’s lakeside cabin. Expecting to find solitude, instead he finds Iris’s lesbian sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt). After much boozing they fall into bed.

But in doing so they drag all manner of baggage into the crisp morning air. He is consumed by guilt. The sister, Hannah, is confused. And her sister, Iris (Emily Blunt), secretly in love with the fragile Jack, is devastated.

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Shelton has authentically recreated all of the dynamics that riddle average family life. Her characters struggle with their emotions and a whole range of secrets they cannot reveal. The central triumvirate all appear to be very smart, emotionally switched-on and giving, particularly Jack.

Shelton and her cast opt for a realist style with a quasi theatrical delivery. The use of improvisational techniques lends the dialogue an immediacy and plausibility that underpins the sense of betrayal and jealousy.

On staggered release