On demand: "Little Sister"

Sometimes it takes a musical interpretation of 9/11 for a movie to grab you. Zach Clark's 2016 film Little Sister appears to be heading towards Indie Plot 101: The Tumultuous Homecoming when its heroine Colleen (Addison Timlin), a novitiate in the New York of 2008, wanders into a Brooklyn artspace where hipster kids dressed as commercial jetliners are smashing into cardboard representations of the Twin Towers to a soundtrack of industrial crashes and bangs. Colleen's there to support a friend, wimpled angel that she is, but we sense she's also been drawn here by a pre-existing interest in confronting the recent past. Awaiting her back at her family's North Carolina retreat - to which she's due to return for the first time in a while, and where her teenage bedroom has been preserved exactly as it was when she fled - is her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson), a badly scarred Gulf War II veteran who's holed himself up in a guest annexe, taking his anger and frustration out on a drumkit morning, noon and night. The pair's manic-depressive mother Joani (Ally Sheedy) greets our girl with the scarcely reassuring "I'm on medicine now", a line that instantly communicates what she's been through, where she's at, and what drove Colleen to the nunnery in the first place. From the outset, Clark reveals himself as a filmmaker big on context and understanding. That the 9/11 performance art never feels like an edgelord's shock-and-awe tactic is down to the fact a) we're a further fifteen years on, b) it does seem exactly the kind of sophomoric anti-Dubya protest a Brooklyn art collective might have staged in 2008, and c) like Colleen and Jacob, that collective are themselves visibly struggling to process it all. One of the liberating joys of Little Sister is how it acknowledges the first years of this century have been, well, a lot.

It gets there by striking a distinctive, assured, persuasive tone. Between the opening Marilyn Manson quote (rendered, like the faintly ominous title, in a baroque font that nods to Colleen's past life as a Goth), the eerie theremin creeping onto the soundtrack, the presence of scream queen Barbara Crampton as Colleen's mother superior, the bandages Jacob wears about his head and the Hallowe'en party with which Clark brings matters to a close, it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe the film as horror-adjacent. But then Little Sister realises 21st century American life could itself be described as horror-adjacent, all guns and bombs and violent lurches to new extremes. (Time and again, this camera lands upon those consolations these characters use to take the edge off, be they prayer, beer, pot or porn.) If it never tips over into full-blown American nightmare, it's because Clark balances the offscreen carnage and chaos with onscreen compassion and connection: Colleen ordering a kebab for a homeless man (cuing a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Alex Karpovsky cameo), Colleen's schoolfriend Emily (Molly Plunk) sharing war stories from her time on the animal liberation front, family friends offering guided tours of their herb farm and encomiums to the adoption process. Once upon a time, around that pre-millennial golden age, indie films were predisposed to sneer at such obviously bourgeois concerns, but Clark frames his creations as people trying to do the right thing, to effectuate positive change, in a world where it's increasingly hard to know what that might look like.

What the film does discern is a clear generational faultline, separating those older liberals who assumed electing a Black Democrat to the highest office would fix everything from those who've seen and absorbed the full extent of the damage, and how bad things might still get. Little Sister proposes an alternative index of progress, slower and steadier: it grants Colleen seven days, as long as the Lord took to create the universe, to intervene in the lives of her nearest and dearest, and it recognises there will be as many problems she can't fix as can. In a weird way, it's another faith movie - albeit a faith movie that opens with the words of the Antichrist Superstar, and denies itself the get-out clause of miracles. These are forever people problems, and it helps that Clark has such excellent people on his side. Timlin certainly has the poise and gentle mien of a nun-to-be, but she also conveys someone who might readily blanch her face in anticipation of a GWAR gig - as, indeed, she does for some mid-film performance art of her own, which might also register as highly offensive were it not this sweet and charming, so touchingly well-intentioned. Sheedy's presence has an elevated extratextual resonance: if you've ever wondered how John Hughes and his characters might have fared had they endured into this century and been forced to confront the consequences of conservatism, this film's for you. Sheedy still has that appealing glint of crazy about her, especially in a scene that demands Joani wield a large kitchen knife, but then - as the movie insinuates - if you're not now crazy in some way, whether crazy-mad or crazy-sad, then you just haven't got your eyes open. Self-contained, heading towards a long-delayed conversation that repairs some small, fraying corner of this world, Little Sister might easily have been buried on streaming and forgotten about as just another indie reckoning with trauma. Yet Clark remains commendably sincere about this scar tissue, and ensures all his characters have layers besides: in a move that somehow typifies Little Sister, he reserves his wisest words for a passing stripper who threatens to suffocate Jacob with her breasts.

Little Sister is now streaming via Prime Video.