Warning: This is a spoiler-heavy post. If you haven't seen Your Sister's Sister yet and don't want to be spoiled, please stop reading!
Your Sister's Sister is a great movie up until the last 20 minutes, during which it resolves one of the central conflicts in a manner so laughably unrealistic and 'kumbaya' that I think I actually was laughing out loud in the theater. Which sucks, because everything that led up to the conclusion was great!
YSS is the latest film by Lynn Shelton, the little-known, very talented director of Humpday. Like Humpday (which is awesome--go see it now), YSS centers on relationships and sexual politics. YSS stars Mark Duplass in an excellent performance as Jack, a cute, neurotic 30-something who is still mourning the death of his brother a year later. Jack's best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt, also giving a great performance), sends him out to her family's isolated, unplugged vacation home to relax and "think about his life". Assuming he'll be alone, Jack is surprised to run into Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), Iris' half-sister, at the cabin. Hannah just walked out of a 7 year long relationship with another woman and is drinking her troubles away in the middle of the night. Jack joins her and...one thing leads to another (they bone...very awkwardly).
When Iris unexpectedly shows up, Jack pleads with Hannah not to tell Iris what happened. Once Iris reveals to Hannah that she is secretly in love with Jack, Hannah agrees not to share their secret. But...there's a catch.
When watching the trailer (which reveals the above conflict) for YSS, I kept thinking, "So what? He drunkenly slept with the lesbian half-sister. This really doesn't mean than Jack and Iris can't be together. I mean, it was a one night stand, right?"
Well, once Hannah reveals her desire to have a baby at any cost and Jack suspiciously digs up the used condom and finds out that Hannah poked holes in it and never planned to tell him (!!!), I realized that damn, that is a good twist!
So now we have Iris in love with Jack and vice versa, but a possible baby on the way due to Hannah's unconscionable manipulations. I was genuinely shocked and outraged on Jack's behalf. That has got to be some kind of sexual abuse, right? JESUS.
To this point, YSS is great: great acting all around, a compelling plot, and a crazy twist. But then, once all the characters know about Iris and Jack's secret love for each other, the fact that Jack slept with Hannah, and the fact that Hannah is possibly carrying Jack's child...
...We get a 10 minute montage of the characters walking in nature, riding their bikes, cooking dinner, and you know, thinking about what transpired. And then, Iris tells Hannah that she wants to help raise the baby if there is one. And Jack returns to the cabin, after storming off in a rage a few days earlier, and says that he loves Iris and also wants to help raise the baby if there is one.
The second to last scene is a freakin' GROUP HUG between the characters, in which, I shit you not, Jack says to Hannah, "Get over here you sperm stealer!" before enveloping her in his forgiving arms.
WHAT?!
Ok, no. Just...no. I'm cool with unrealistically happy endings in Disney movies and movies like Juno and Moonrise Kingdom that take place in TweeWorld as opposed to the "real world". But YSS is supposed to be this super-realistic movie about human interactions. And, to me, Hannah is a freakin' criminal! Her lie is so huge and has such life-altering consequences for Jack, that the concept of the whole thing being forgiven and accepted in two or three days (along with a mopey montage) is laughable.
Yes, sometimes one night stands result in a baby. But usually not through premeditated sabotage of birth control.
Yes, I could conceive of someone sabotaging someone else's birth control and the other person forgiving them. But not so easily and flippantly as in the end of YSS.
What if the roles were reversed? What if Jack wanted a baby and poked holes in the condom? Hannah would, in all likelihood, press criminal charges. At the very least, she'd have an abortion. Not such a rosy ending there.
So, to reiterate. Your Sister's Sister is a solid, very good film until the last 20 minutes. I could not buy the ending, and was actually kind of mad about it. Normally, I'd give the movie 4 or 4.5 stars, but I must knock it down because the ending was so outrageous.
3.5 stars out of 5
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