The Screengrab

Mark and Jay Duplass, the duo behind the seminal mumblecore feature The Puffy Chair, are back with what has been most often described as "the mumblecore horror movie." That's a fun marketing hook, but you shouldn't expect Baghead to be a nerve-jangling exercise in terror ala The Strangers, even if both movies feature menacing figures with bags on their heads. At once a self-reflexive send-up of the lo-fi movement they helped launch and a sly love quadrangle, Baghead is more funny than scary, although some of the relationship issues it explores may give you the heebie-jeebies. The set-up is simple: four struggling actors hole up in a cabin in the woods for a weekend, planning to write a movie for all of them to star in. In this exclusive clip, available only on the Screengrab, a brainstorming session turns into an awkward attempt at seduction.

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Baghead bills itself as being presented by "the Duplass Brothers." That's Jay Duplass, who a few years ago directed The Puffy Chair, from a script he co-wrote with brother Mark, who starred in it and produced it. Along though The Puffy Chair was no major world-changing feat, it had a story and actual jokes and was decently lit, all of which easily set it apart from the work of most of the filmmakers who've been lumped together under the heading "mumblecore"--such as Joe Swanberg, whose Hannah Takes the Stairs featured Mark Duplass as the first, and funniest, of the serial boyfriends of the confused heroine (Greta Gerwig). The Dupplass boys may be having second thoughts about that, because Baghead, on which they share writing and directing credits, opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed "mumblecore"-style independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the insides. After the in-jokes are out of the way, our heroes--two failed actor-brothers named Matt (Ross Partridge) and Chad (Steve Zissis) and the women in their lives (played by Gerwig and Elise Muller)-- repair to a family house in the woods to work on their fantasy of writing a script for a movie that will launch the four of them out of film-extra work and to see what they can come up with in the way of comedy and drama with the tangle of misfiring sexual and romantic attractions between them. (Chad, who's a bit of a schlub in comparison to his brother--"You got Elvis hair," he tells him reproachfully--is in love with Gerwig, who has does indeed have the hots for Matt, who in turn think that he and Muller have broken up as a couple, even though she still regards him as her "soul mate.")

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