Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Aisha Dee, Hannah Barlow, Emily De Margheriti, Daniel Monks, Lucy Barrett, Yerin Ha
Intro:
… a lurid, engaging, violent little morality tale with great performances, creative (albeit cartoony) gore and enough dark twists to keep all but the dourest genre fan happy.
Social media, in one form or another, has been with us since the early 2000s. That’s two decades of our brains being afflicted by humanity’s most narcissistic dopamine delivery system. It’s already pretty bad for those of us old enough to remember a time before Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, but what about those generations who’ve never known a world without it? Well, if entertaining Aussie horror comedy Sissy is to be believed, they’re in a lot of trouble.
The film tells the twisted tale of Cecilia (Aisha Dee), a quite successful (200K subs, baby!) wellness influencer who, despite having a legion of followers, is a bit of a recluse. After running into her old childhood bestie Emma (Hannah Barlow), Cecilia hopes to rekindle their friendship and ends up getting invited to Em’s hen’s weekend at a gorgeous but remote house somewhere in the Australian bush. The only problem? The house belongs to Cecilia’s school bully Alex (Emily De Margheriti) and let’s just say not everything has been forgiven. As tensions rise over the course of the weekend, an awkward social situation soon turns deadly.
Sissy is an odd duck. In its early minutes, it feels like a Gen-Z take on the heightened Aussie comedy dramas of the ‘90s like Muriel’s Wedding or Strictly Ballroom, with exaggerated characters and broad performances, and while it never loses that sense of heightened reality, it certainly gets a shitload darker. Aisha Dee anchors the film with a rock-solid performance and a likable, albeit fundamentally flawed and sporadically deranged, character in Cecilia. Emma and her friends, on the other hand, are such a bunch of hideous, arrogant wankers (with the possible exception of Fran played by Lucy Barrett) that you can’t wait for them to get their well-deserved comeuppance.
Having a host of unlikable potential victims-to-be is nothing new in horror flicks – just watch any Friday the 13th film or, hell, Bodies Bodies Bodies – but some audience members may bristle at being forced to spend 100-something minutes enduring people who, in real life, you’d fake your own death to avoid.
There’s also a certain frustration in Sissy almost, but never quite, embracing the idea of actually saying something meaningful about the toll that image-focused social media takes on a person’s soul, but perhaps this is just a case of an aging Gen-Xer wanting a little more subtext with their Gen-Z blood bath. What Sissy does provide, thanks to canny work from directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, is a lurid, engaging, violent little morality tale with great performances, creative (albeit cartoony) gore and enough dark twists to keep all but the dourest genre fan happy.
