The Duplass Brothers were quite prolific in the early aughts, releasing eight features between 2005 and 2012. Jay Duplass took a break from directing features after 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathelon. During Pandemmy Times, he (like a lot of folks) did some soul searching and found two projects in rapid succession. The Baltimorons came out in 2025. See You When I See You is the second film from the newly invigorated Duplass. Coincidentally (?) both films are comedies centered around suicide. They don’t sound particularly funny, but those Duplass boys are masters of tone juggling. Their films often pack an emotional punch but soften the blow with built-in humor along the way. The jokes mostly don’t come from the circumstances, but from the characters themselves. There’s an extra layer of comedy in See You When I See You, because the scribe who based the screenplay on his own memoir (Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragic-Comic Memoir), is comedian Adam Cayton-Holland.
Cayton-Holland’s 2018 memoir is about how his family fell apart and came back together after his little sister’s suicide. He adapted it into a slightly less autobiographical screenplay and gave it to producing pals Emily v. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani to shop around. Gordon and Nanjiani are no strangers to this genre, having made their own reality-based tragic-comedy, The Big Sick. Duplass was hesitant to accept their directing offer because he’d never made a film that he didn’t write himself. But when he read the screenplay, it reminded him of the genre-straddling films he loved in his youth like Terms of Endearment and Kramer vs Kramer. Duplass did give the script an overhaul with his own proverbial pen, adding visual illustrations of internal conflict that are very effective, without being too expository or heavy-handed.
We first meet the Whistler family as they’re in the process of cleaning out the house left behind by Leah (Kaitlyn Dever), the baby of the family. Robert (David Duchovny) and Page (Hope Davis) are the grieving parents, arguing over how much of Leah’s childhood art they should keep. Emily (Lucy Boynton) is the oldest sibling, and we can tell right away she’s the one running the show. Inside the house, Aaron (Cooper Raiff) gets lost in the memory of a family photo taken on the dock of a Lakehouse. Right away, we know so much about who these people are. They’re close, but they also have trouble talking to each other about hard things and get bogged down in details. Aaron is too paralyzed by grief to be any help. His journey into the photo memory also hints at a recurring story device, which illustrates his despair and PTSD in profound ways. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like it…
Read the rest of this review at Hammer to Nail!
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