Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Cecilia has become a successful influencer, using self-help meditation rituals of her own creation. Unfortunately, she has yet to conquer her insecurities truly, and when she gets invited to spend some quality time with a long-lost childhood bestie, her childhood bully is there too, bringing up long-dormant fears and forcing her to take a more aggressive approach to deal with her problems. At times admirable, at others frustrating, the movie is a bit of a mixed bag of bullying tropes.
Directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Sears
Bullying is the source of many a horror classic. Unchecked bullying can lead to revenge, and when the victims get pushed past their boiling point, the tables can turn… violently. The benchmark of such stories of course would be Carrie. You can also look to Let The Right One In, Valentine, Ginger Snaps, Christine, May, and Sleepaway Camp for prime examples. Another release from 2022, Stag explores very similar themes.
The key ingredient to a successful bullying horror film is that you need to empathize with the victim. It is a tricky line as you are naturally inclined to side with the victim, the underdog, in the battle between the powerful and the weak. Make the victim too pathetic, and you risk rooting for someone who may not deserve the sympathy. Make the victim too strong, and you risk any dramatic tension.
Such is the challenge for Sissy. The movie introduces two young girls by way of a home video recording of Cecilia (Amelia Lule) and her bestie Emma (April Blasdall). The girls clown around as little girls do, swearing eternal allegiance to each other. Besties forever! The narrative hooks set as the cuteness factor kicks in. Fast forward ten years to the present day, and Cecilia (Aisha Dee) is now a successful self-help online influencer. She is instructing people in methods that she uses to de-tox their emotional beings, in her own unique handcrafted techniques.
One fateful day, she encounters Emma (Hannah Barlow) in a pharmacy, and the interaction is awkward. As children, they were best friends, but an event between them has estranged them. Emma informs Cecilia that she is having a bachelorette party. She and her new girlfriend are gathering in a fabulous country estate. Emma very much wants Cecelia to be there, but it’s awkward. Emma’s new circle of friends are all flamboyant narcissistic hipsters, and Cecelia is reluctant to join. She feels like a square peg in this new array of round holes that are Emma’s social entourage. Cecilia still has a deep-seated love for Emma, and she decides to reconnect with her old friend.
This was a mistake.
Waiting for the party crew at the rural estate is Alex (Emily DeMargheriti), the charismatic and wicked bully who broke up the childhood relationship between Emma and Cicely. Alex still bears the scars of her last engagement with Cicely (Who she derides as “Sissy”). Alex is furious and continually berates and mocks Cicely. The other party guests join the unflattering dogpile in picking on the seemingly hapless young woman.
Eventually, things go too far. Cicely reveals that her latent violent streak, long suppressed by her meditation methods, percolates to the surface, and she snaps. She flips from appeasing Wallflower into the queen of revenge, and to be fair, it feels very earned. The question is, does this allow the audience to root for her?
Kinda. Sort of. Not as much as I would have liked. I wanted to root for Cicely, but I found myself often frustrated with her inaction, at first, and then later, her actions.
The delicate dance of the bully-themed horror film, as I described earlier, requires the audience to empathize with the victim. In horror films, the retribution tends to be out of proportion to the cause, and it certainly is here. The problem with Sissy is that despite the solid acting and a rational plot, you don’t feel for any of the characters. When the movie finished, my first thought was, “She should have stayed home.” Also, I saw all of the victims as tragic ends, even if they were largely unlikeable characters. There was no sense of elation of the killings that occurred. And for the most part, you could see the savagery coming. There was only one surprising character conclusion.
Cecelia is inherently a good person, but her turn is so jarring that it becomes difficult to continue sympathizing. It doesn’t help that none of the cast is appealing; they are prototypically narcissistic and oblivious members of the LGBT hipster culture. Vanity and obsession with superficial things play into LGBT community stereotypes that I thought we had gotten past. It’s not a good look.
I may not be the target audience for this film, even though Arthouse horror normally appeals to me. I expect that a younger audience will see this differently than me, and reactions from other festival goers suggest that a Gen Z audience would be more receptive. It’s a slow-burn movie, and I tend to like slow burners, but perhaps because the build-up was full of socially awkward interactions, it was a bit of a chore to get through initially. It is a character-forward film. It is free of gimmicks and cheap gags. No clumsy jump scares. I tip my cap to the use of foreshadowing. The foreshadowing mixes in easily without any red flags.
So, it’s a skillfully produced and structured film. The lead roles, particularly Cicely, are well done. I would have to say it leaves me with mixed impressions, and I’m sure there is a more specific audience (young women, perhaps?) who might find this production more compelling. Visually, the movie had some really strong moments, showing off the rural South Australian locale very well. The gore effects and makeup work have some real high points. (Kid Cicely’s retribution on kid Alex was a show-stopper.) I found Sissy to be a capable movie that failed to engage me in the way I thought it wanted to. It’s a mix of the frustrating and the admirable that makes it a difficult movie to judge.
Sissy is not yet rated, but it would certainly land a strong R rating for brutal violence and character-on-character emotional cruelty.