Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes
Starring: Aisha Dee, Hannah Barlow, Emily De Margheriti, Daniel Monks, Yerin Ha, Lucy
Barrett, Shaun Martindale, Amelia Lule, April Blasdall, Camille
Cumpston
Writer/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes open their
Ozploitation social media satire Sissy with an almost
identical scene to that which recently opened Steven Soderbergh's
Kimi. An "influencer" delivers a video message to their adoring followers
in front of an inspiring pink wall. But once the video is finished, said
influencer, Cecilia (Aisha Dee), moves away from her set into the
drab reality of her life, walking around her dimly lit apartment in
comfy pyjamas.
On a trip to the supermarket, Cecilia gets a reminder of her past,
bumping into her childhood BFF Emma (Barlow), who invites Cecilia (whom
she still calls "Sissy", much to Cecilia's annoyance) to her
bachelorette party. Cecilia might have 200,000 Instagram followers, but
in reality she's friendless, and so she's happy to accept. Through
flashbacks we see how the young Emma and Sissy made a pact that they
would grow old together, but somewhere along the line the pair
separated.
The reasons for their separation become clear when Sissy and Emma -
joined by the latter's American fiancée Fran (Lucy Barrett) and
their vacuous friends Tracey (Yerin Ha) and Jamie (Daniel Monks) – arrive at their destination, a remote villa owned by the family of
Alex (Emily De Margheriti). Flashbacks imply that Alex was
Sissy's childhood tormentor, but the truth is revealed to be somewhat
more complex.
If a movie opens with a bunch of people headed for a getaway driving
past a piece of roadkill, you know things are going to go south. If they
run over an animal on the way to their destination, they're really
screwed. Barlow and Senes make good on both these tropes, which they
knowingly insert early on. Several horror movies have used the idea of a
character forced to put an animal out of its misery to foreshadow
violence to come, but few call back to it in quite the way
Sissy does in one of its more gruesome moments.
Sissy may employ a lot of tired tropes, but it also has
fun playing with them. In the title character we get the archetypal
"final girl", the smart but socially awkward young woman surrounded by
airheads who don't really understand her. The subversion here is that
the final girl is also the villain, though after seeing Sissy subjected
to a cruel face to face version of an online pile-on at the hands of
Alex and her friends, you may well view her as something of an
anti-hero.
At this point, making fun of the vacuous nature of social media has
been done to death, and I could happily live without hearing another
joke about someone getting "cancelled." While this element of
Sissy doesn't say anything new, it's Dee's performance
that gives it some depth. She flits from bubbly and enthused to scared
and lonely to outright psychotic in convincing fashion. The movie
doesn't condone the violent rampage she undertakes, but her victims are
drawn so broadly as bitchy mean girls that it's impossible not to have
fun seeing them dispatched in the sort of violent fashion we've come to
expect from the no holds barred world of Ozploitation.
Sissy is on Shudder from
September 29th.
