Little Sister

Little Sister is one of the many recent indie productions that attempts to set itself apart from the mainstream by letting overplayed quirkiness masquerade as humor. A subdued hipster-turned-nun, Colleen (Addison Timlin) moves from Brooklyn to Asheville, NC, to please her mentally disturbed mother (played by a wizened Ally Sheedy), trying to leave her goth-girl past behind to make a new life as a servant of the Lord without being driven to the brink of insanity by her hypercritical mother and her annoying dork of a father. Colleen's brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) is a creepily exploited character—an Iraq war veteran who was badly burned in an explosion and is presented as sort of a figure of fun, which is indicative of the tin-eared humor in this film set in 2008, which also banks on crude terrorism and 9/11 jokes and silly religious humor to carry the flat dialogue. Director-screenwriter Zach Clark unsuccessfully tries to mine family dysfunction for laughs, but portraying Colleen's parents as bumbling passive-aggressive misfits doesn't really add up to much more than predictable teen comedy swipes at parental authority. And Timlin's turn as Colleen is a wasted opportunity—instead of investing the character with necessary empathetic human dimension, she somnambulates uncomfortably through the movie as if nursing a particularly acute migraine headache. Optional. (M. Sandlin)