Signs: "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"

Anyone who abhors coincidence and happenstance in the movies - scenes where characters end up in the same place, as if by magic, or guided by the hand of destiny - would be well advised to stay at home for Jeff, Who Lives at Home. This is the world according to the eponymous 30-year-old stoner (Jason Segel) who, from his base in his mother's basement, has devised a life-philosophy based on the early works of M. Night Shyamalan: one which invites believers to read the heaviest of significance into life's random signs and signifiers, lest they miss events of some hidden import. Sent out into the world one day to buy wood glue to fix a broken slat on his mother's cupboard door, Jeff's fate will become dramatically linked with that of his brother (Ed Helms), who may be the world's worst husband, responding to his wife's pleas to cut back by investing in a silver Porsche from the manufacturer's mid-life crisis range; and that self-same wife (Judy Greer), who may accordingly be having an affair with a co-worker who actually bothers to listen to her.

Any synopsis of the flukes and intersections that follow from this would likely read like a pothead's hazy recollection of several Shyamalan features (not to mention Jonathan Nossiter's Signs and Wonders and Jenniphr Goodman's The Tao of Steve, two notable indies the filmmakers may have absorbed late at night on the Sundance Channel), yet strangely, they hang together as a semi-logical narrative, as observed from the perspective of Jeff's singular worldview: as the final shot goes to underline, there's a place for everything, and everything has its place, within this particular universe. After the patchy one-two of The Puffy Chair (a mumblecore variant clearly made by directors with one eye on the mainstream) and Cyrus (an attempt at a crossover-indie that fell between two stools), Jeff forms a step-up for the Duplass brothers, the mumblecore alumni here handed resources enough to wreck a Porsche twice over and stage another, climactic road traffic accident. If they're not reaching for the Big Themes of a Judd Apatow just yet, the film's a demonstration the directors can do something sweet and focused with a cast of capable, versatile performers, and Segel (a performer who continues to grow on me) and Helms lend a certain weight of pathos to characters who could easily have drifted into the realms of lazy caricature.

Crucially, and encouragingly, the Duplasses avoid the easy misogyny of the New American Comedy. While grading the men on a sliding scale of patheticness - Jeff the picture of pudgy sensitivity, his brother the model of absolute insensitivity - it allows Greer's wife the time to give her reasons why she might be drawn to hotel rooms with other men, and does something surprising and winning with Susan Sarandon and Rae Dawn Chong, two actresses now well into the second acts of their career, as co-workers using this 24-hour rip in the space-time continuum/break from monotonous reality to themselves seek out greater happiness in life. True, you might be bugged by the near-supernatural levels of contrivance involved, or by the idea that mumblecore turns out to have been merely the latest way by which to get us to the hugs and kisses with which Hollywood product traditionally ties everything up. It remains faultlessly good-natured, though: a nice, not untimely advert for remaining open to the world, its signs and its wonders, no matter how unprepossessing your own life-situation might currently be.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home opens in selected cinemas from Friday.