SISSY (2022)

Streaming on Shudder!
Directed and written by Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes.
Check out the trailer here!!

Cecilia (Aisha Dee) copes with a troubled past and has grown to be quite a successful self-care influencer, practicing what she preaches in order to get through life’s day to day struggles. But a chance encounter in a drug store reunites Cecilia (who used to be called Sissy by her friends) with childhood bestie Emma (Hannah Barlow). Emma is about to get married and invites her long-lost best friend to join her on a vacation weekend in the countryside. Unbeknownst to Cecilia, this vacation is at the home of Sissy’s childhood rival Alex (Emily De Margheriti), who still literally bares the scars from their last encounter. What ensues is an ungluing of a mind that is barely hanging on and hinges on an addiction to social media.

SISSY is either the most tone-deaf film I’ve ever seen or a spot-on farce of today’s social media obsessed and social judgement fueled society. It depicts a typical Youtuber, whose message is not the deepest, but still has good intentions and adds on the pressure on all sides until she cracks. Surrounding her is as diverse a cast as you’re going to get. There’s the lesbian couple. The stereotypical, media obsessed Asian gal who hangs around with the stereotypical gay guy who also happens to be handicapped and both are wildly addicted to reality shows, of courseys. And finally, there’s the vapid starlet with insecurity issues. All of them come together on the same trip and act like besties when it’s doubtful a group this diverse would even give each other the time of day in the really real world. Sissy finds herself having to confront some pretty heinous things she did in the past, things she has basically blocked out and attempted to move on from without, you know, dealing with it head on. The group is constantly talking about social status, cancelling others, group gossip, and all of the shallow stuff people with no real personality of their own seems to fill the space between their ears with. At the half-hour to forty-minute mark, I found myself saying, I can’t take these people anymore and then saying, this has got to be the setup for a joke. The filmmakers can’t be this vacuous.

Turns out, filmmakers aren’t. At about the forty-minute mark, the shit hits the fan and what at first felt like a glorification of social addiction and all of its accompanying aspects turns into an unrelenting commentary on that kind of culture. All of the vacant stuff I mentioned above is just fuel used to light a bonfire of ire toward mostly everyone in this cast. While some characters are less disgusting than others, the way the events go down in SISSY, no one gets out unscathed or unworthy of a good scathing. SISSY quickly becomes a wonderful satire of social addiction and every ugly, empty thing wrong with it.

The insanely cool thing about SISSY is that the audience are made privy to Sissy/Cecelia’s sequence of major blunders as they occur. We are witness to the why these horrifying and gory things happen, giving us some insight into the situation and thus some sympathy for someone who we really shouldn’t be caring about. To add even more relevant depth to the film, everyone who isn’t aware of what was happening rush to a snap judgement, just as people do in social media. So we are given the two-fold view of the action and the snap reaction all at once. It’s a wonderful way of commenting on cancel culture and those who fall into it. What I thought was a brainless phone-addled viewpoint actually morphs into something quite ingenious and impactful.

It helps that Aisha Dee depicts the truly bent Sissy/Cecelia in a genuinely sympathetic way who falls into this comedy of horrors without really understanding what she is doing or how to get out of it. Dee depicts Cecelia as barely holding on to her sanity and while you are rooting for her to keep her wits, I couldn’t help but cheer as terror befalls these awful people around her. But then again, Dee isn’t afraid to put Sissy/Cecelia into a very unflattering light by playing a character that you shouldn’t be rooting for. The only thing I have seen Dee in was the “Nowhere House” season of CHANNEL ZERO. But as decent as she was in that series, she’s grown to quite a memorable actress here as Sissy.

The rest of the cast is great at playing people I want to see meet their end. There’s a catharsis to that and seeing how great it felt seeing these shallow, judgmental assholes get their makes me salivate at what slashers like Jason will be doing to these types of people if we ever get a new FRIDAY THE 13TH. Until then, SISSY is a worthy substitute. Bite your lip and chug past the cringey first thirty or so minutes so you can see these horrible people get what’s coming to them for the rest of SISSY. I promise, you’ll get a kick out of it and marvel at how much of an intelligent cautionary tale this seemingly pretentious movie actually evolves into.