Award-winning French actor Ariane Labed directs her first feature film, a self-aware and self-conscious work she has adapted from the novel Sisters by Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson. Johnson’s own debts to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are acknowledged in the film with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”, and a visual quote from The Shining. It’s made in a style clearly influenced by the Greek new wave in which Labed made her name in films such as Attenberg and Alps.
There’s an awful lot to grab the attention here: a story of an intense sisterly bond in a private shared world, a lot of set-pieces, big performances, dysfunctional violence and a hallucination involving lemurs. And yet I felt it didn’t really come together; this is an international coproduction in which something is lost in translation. The action takes place in Oxford and Yorkshire in the book; in the film it apparently starts somewhere in the UK as there is a preponderance of English accents (certainly among the main characters) although one scene is evidently set in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Then the action moves to rural Ireland with Irish accents.
September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) are teen sisters born 10 months apart to Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar) an artist and photographer and now a single mum, who has perhaps encouraged their strangeness by posing them for weird portraits. Dominating, charismatic September holds submissive July under her spell, summoning her with a whistle; July has to steady herself by staring at her finger. The two girls are brutally bullied at school and September responds with violence; when she is excluded, Sheela takes them to their grandma’s cottage on the Irish coast and things become very strange.
This is a movie that strains and contorts for its effects; the performances are strong – strong enough to carry the big twist – and Labed might have absorbed Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparable film The Silent Twins, although that was unselfconscious and heartfelt in a way that this isn’t. It’s a film that feels actorly rather than real.
• September Says is in UK cinemas from 21 February.
• The headline of this article was amended on 19 February 2025 to remove an incorrect reference to the sisters being twins.
