Baghead, which was acquired by Sony Classics towards the end of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, is getting a lot of praise for taking the elements of mumblecore–stripped down cinematography, unpolished performances, an extreme interest in the minutia of behavior at the expense of action–and ambitiously pairing them with the tropes of mainstream shlock horror. But Baghead is never convincing as a horror film, and I don’t think it needs to be, and I’m not sure it even wants to be. What it really is, is a comedy (of horrors?) about ego, which the Duplasses and their actors convince is scarier than any kind of contrived fright.

Four friends, all wannabe actors and all frustrated to different degrees by the film festival success of a pretentious cheeseball aquaintance, head to a house in the woods to hammer out a script for the project that will give them their big breaks. The gang includes Matt, a charismatic idea man; Chad, Matt’s schlubby”funny guy” friend; Catherine, Matt’s orange-tan cliche of a sometime girlfriend; and Michelle, the adorable younger woman who brings out the worst in the rest of the three.

The only one of the four who seems really committed to the careerist angle of the endeavor is Matt, with the other three seemingly going along solely as the means to advance their respective romantic agendas. Chad loves Michelle, who loves (or, at least, lusts for) Matt, who tells Chad everything is over between he and Catherine but is still clearly susceptible to her late-night advances. As each “friend”s real, purely selfish intentions become apparent, trust breaks down and each member of the quarter becomes (not unreasonably) paranoid that another is out to get them.

In the middle of this climate, Michelle has an ambiguously real encounter with a man with a bag on his head. Is this “baghead” a drunken delusion? The prank work of the jealous and manipulative Catherine? Or a sign that a sinister/supernatural force is soon going to make sure this group puts aside their self-absorbed romantic squabbles in favor of self-preservation?

The press notes refer to Baghead’s plot as “a Scooby-Doo narrative,” and as far as self-deprecation goes, that’s cute, but I’m not sure if it’s really accurate. As in that cartoon and certain Oscar-nominated films that adopt some of its tropes, in Baghead there’s a last-minute expository switcharoo, a scene towards the end of the film in which one character reveals to others that the plot they’ve been playing out is not what it seems. But in Baghead, this reversal/revelation feels less like a cheat than a relief, a sign that we were right to put our trust in the Duplass’ naturalism all along.

What the Duplasses are really adept at––what truly sets them apart from their lo-fi American indie brethren––is an almost antiquated kind of physical comedy. There’s a scene early in the film in which Matt, having seen his other three friends grease the wheel at a social event by using cell phones, whips out his wallet and holds it to his ear. The punchline comes from watching him pay the price for this antic, but the whole nearly-silent sequence could have been ripped from Looney Tunes. The Duplasses can bastardize as many Hollywood genres as they want, but at their core, they’re born comedians, and the world is a better place for it.