Cyrus

The big kick to be gotten from Cyrus, the creepy new Oedipal comedy from the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair, Humpday) is how it finds heart and truth underneath the trappings of what could have been just a gross-out Mumblecore romance. John C. Reilly is a depressed divorced guy who lovely, sad-eyed Marisa Tomei meets while he’s drunkenly urinating on the shrubbery at a party. “Nice penis,” she observes without missing a beat. Their new romance starts well, then out of the woodwork pops Tomei’s grown, stay-at-home unemployed 21-year-old son, Jonah Hill—a guy whose stare is so intense and whose affect is so odd that we almost hear Psycho strings shrieking whenever he materializes.

As Hill sets out to destroy his mother’s new relationship, it’s impossible not to feel the horror movie lurking just underneath the surface of the Duplass brothers’ quips and bizarre situations that grow progressively darker, stranger and, sometimes, funnier, until the finale that feels like a cop out, why-were-we-put-through-this? sort of thing. The tricky, discomforting comedy is played to perfection by Reilly, Tomei and Hill, as well as supporting players Catherine Keener (as Reilly’s ex) and Matt Walsh (as Keener’s new guy). There’s so much crazy mother-love going on in Cyrus that it’s only fitting that the movie is being released the same week Psycho opened 50 years ago.