Little Sister

A young lady who's training to become a nun returns home for the first time in three years to see her brother, who was injured in Iraq. She's trying to rebuild her connection with her brother, while also dealing with her mother's erratic behavior, and trying to sort out if she really does want to commit to being a nun.

The movie's central idea, espoused by a character fairly late in the film is that we're all screw-ups, but if you hang together that's enough. Everyone's got crap they shouldn't be proud of, that kind of thing. Colleen (the aspiring nun) seems to have tried to run very far from her high schools days as an angry Goth. Like she's trying very hard to be a nun, or a good Christian or whatever, but has done so by trying to excise some critical portion of herself. Possibly because she associates it with her mother (played by Ally Sheedy), who has had some emotional issues, and seems like an overbearing parent. Where she means well, but she tries too hard to make everyone do things a certain way.

The movie has this approach of focusing on the face of one character, while only showing another character from the torso down. And the one whose face we can't see is often the one doing that talking. Especially with Sheedy's character. Which is interesting, it puts the viewer's focus solely on the reaction to the words, rather than giving us any facial cues about what's driving the words. There's one point where a video of a childhood Halloween is playing, and Jacob's begins squirting Colleen with a water gun. Harmless, but their mother rushes in screaming at him about no guns in the house. And we only see her from the stomach down, so we don't get any sense of what's the cause. Fear, simply a desire for dominance. We just see the two kids, looking downcast.

It was an interesting little movie. There are some horribly awkward moments where people try to interact with Jacob, and take entirely the wrong approach to it, and you can just see him getting uncomfortable, desperate to be anywhere else. Even though they mean well, it's hard to watch, because no one is taking him on his terms, they're all trying to shoehorn him into whatever category they want to place him in.