Sissy (Movie Review)

Screened as part of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival

Reconnecting with old friends can be tricky, and sometimes even traumatic. In the best case, the old bonds click into place seamlessly and the gap in time is a nothing more than a blip in a relationship that stretches across the years. Other times, paths have diverged and people have changed and there's no way to reignite the spark of the past. Long buried anxiety and stress can come bubbling to the surface and old wounds can be reopened when the reality of being reminded of who you used to be rubs against the reality of who you believe yourself to be today. Often these bad reunions just end in awkwardness and disappointment, but directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes escalate things to a much more splattery level in their sparkly horror comedy Sissy.

Cecilia (don’t call her Sissy) (Aisha Dee) is a woo-woo wellness influencer who has found fame and success in encouraging her followers to believe and affirm themselves as they protect the sanctity of their inner safe space. She's made a comfortable career for herself doling out advice in between peddling sponcon, but the real reward of her job is the dopamine hit she gets from seeing the praise of her followers and seeing her engagement metrics go up. One day at a drug store she has a chance run in with Emma, her childhood BFF she hasn't seen in years (played by director Hannah Barlow). Emma is getting married and she insists that Cecilia join her and some friends for a bachelorette party at a remote lakehouse. What could be a wonderful moment for old friends to reconnect is soured when Cecilia realizes that her childhood bully Alex (Emily de Margheriti) is also attending the party and still bears a grudge about some incident in their past that most likely involves the prominent scar along Alex’s jaw line.

In the first half, the horrors of Sissy are primarily based in social anxiety as a Cecilia finds herself feeling like a third wheel as she tries to ingratiate herself with a tight clique of friends while also trying to be strong in the face of the passive aggressive abuse that Alex throws her way. At a certain point, the movie takes a hard left into a much more visceral and familiar form of horror when it begins playing in the slasher sandbox, albeit with a somewhat reluctant killer who is more likely to wear a hydrating face mask than a hockey mask. It’s a bit of a shocker when the gore starts to flow and Sissy moves out of psychological thriller territory and starts painting the walls with Tom Savini-style splattery head-crunching gore, all while punctuated by playful bursts of glitter and a delightfully dreamy string-heavy score by Kenneth Lampl.

Sissy doesn’t engage that deeply with the issues of trauma, anxiety and influencer culture that it raises and ultimately doesn’t have much particularly new or profound to say about them. It's far more sucessful as a 2022 take on cast-attrition slasher movie that puts its own spin on the tropes and tells a satisfying story that very much feels of the moment. Shudder has already aquired it ahead of its debut at SXSW, and it will no doubt give horror fans yet another reason to smash that Subscribe button.