EIFF 2016: Little Sister

Little Sister is a tonic to anyone jaded by the slick, smug and sentimental comedy-dramas (or ‘dramedies’) that have become the mainstay of American independent cinema. On the surface, Zach Clark's film may look like a Sundance favourite, but it’s much spikier than its quirk-filled premise first suggests. It’s a film about a family licking their wounds, finding a ballast after years of turmoil, but Clark’s trump card is this family-in-flux-comedy acts as a mirror to a nation going through a similar process of healing.

It’s 2008. The year’s US presidential campaign is at fever pitch and Obama mania is in the air. At the centre of Clark’s film we find the Lunsfords, who’ve been muddling their way through a post-9/11 haze. The family’s youngest, Colleen (Addison Timlin), is the little sister of the title, in more ways than one. She has turned to the church, estranging herself from her dysfunctional brood in small-town North Carolina and abandoning her teenage goth sensibilities to moved out east to help people on the streets of New York City as an aspiring nun.

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We quickly understand why she’s fled her home when we meet her parents (a wickedly funny Ally Sheedy and Peter Hedges), a pair of Gen X burnouts who’ve been self-medicating their way through the Bush years with a cocktail of booze, pills and pot. Colleen’s older brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) has been the most scarred by Bush’s reign, though – both mentally and physically. A war-hero, he’s recently returned home from Iraq with his face horribly burned and has locked himself in the family’s pool house, where he refuses visitors and takes his frustrations out on his drumkit.

Colleen is granted leave to return home to try and coax Jacob back into society. “It took God six days to create the world,” says Colleen’s supercilious mother superior. “You should be able to sort your life out in five.” But Jacob proves a tougher nut to crack than creation.

Clark’s approach is scrappy but the scuzzy digital aesthetic and herky-jerky camera are the perfect form in which to capture this family's messy emotions. The film is peppered with warping VHS clips of Colleen and Jacob as kids acting out little skits for their parents, but the whole film feels like a home movie, so intimate and humane is Clark’s approach, and so acute his observations. “I thought you’d become a lesbian Satanist,” says Sheedy’s Joani, a bitter pill to Hedges’ goofy patriarch. “You’d have prefered that,” is Colleen’s reply. Clark is constantly dropping these little atomic bombs in among the quirky nuclear family scenarios, never shying away from the cruelty and jealousies that exist between relations.

That’s not to say Little Sister’s tone is ever toxic. It’s alive with wit and style, a film full of possibilities. “Fail to see the tragic, turn to the magic,” goes the opening title card, quoting Colleen's childhood fave Marilyn Manson, and that’s exactly Clark’s approach: he spins a fictional family's pain and real world despair into a lyrical journey of joy and forgiveness.

Little Sister screens at Cineworld, 25 Jun, 6.05pm & 26 Jun, 6.15pm