Movies You Might Have Missed: Mark and Jay Duplass's Cyrus

The Duplass brothers encouraged the actors to improvise in this unnerving comedy that stars John C Reilly as a middle-aged man whose romantic relationship is sabotaged by his lover's son, played by Jonah Hill

A tense moment: Reilly (left) and Hill in 'Cyrus'

Mark and Jay Duplass have been creating original, interesting work since they burst onto the scene with The Puffy Chair in 2005. In the years since, one or both brothers have written, directed, produced and acted in films including Jeff, Who Lives at Home and Creep, as well as recent television programmes such as Togetherness and Room 104. In 2010, the siblings wrote and directed Cyrus, an unnerving comedy drama that blends the ethos of mumblecore with the kind of production values that had been absent from their work up to that point.

John C Reilly plays John, a depressed middle-aged man struggling to cope with the news that his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) is going to marry again. The film opens at a party during which he drinks too much but hits it off with Molly (Marisa Tomei), an affable single mum. This all seems too good to be true and so it proves when John is introduced to Molly’s 21-year-old son, the eponymous Cyrus (Jonah Hill). The relationship Cyrus has with his mother might give Norman Bates pause for thought, and John soon realises this unhinged rival for Molly’s affections will stop at nothing in his bid to break up the couple.

Unusually, the film was shot in sequence, and this method of working aids the mounting tension. The Duplass brothers encouraged the actors to improvise – the tone is entirely naturalistic. Tomei is excellent as the warm and affable mother caught in the middle of a war she wants nothing to do with, while Hill has never been better. The Oedipus complex on display here is never presented with scorn nor derision, the cast and crew keeping things nuanced, allowing us to invest emotionally in the events onscreen.

Reilly only met Tomei a day before the eight-week shoot began because the Duplass brothers dislike rehearsal, fearing it can compromise the realism of a picture. In a sense, this manner of working is closer to Mike Leigh or Curb Your Enthusiasm than conventional Hollywood methods, and Reilly has estimated that something like 80 per cent of his lines were improvised.

As with documentary features, the key work came after filming. Reilly is on record about the Duplass brothers as saying: “They do their screenwriting in the editing room, almost. You know, they gather all this material and they try to guide it and they give a lot over to the actors and then they sit in this room for six months and reconstruct what they have.”

The result is a touching, original and idiosyncratic movie from filmmakers reaching maturity.