Ariane Labed’s first film as director is precise, clammy and well acted, and for an hour it holds us. Then a turn most viewers will have guessed arrives, is explained, and takes a good deal of the strangeness with it.
Ariane Labed has spent years in front of the camera for Athina Rachel Tsangari and Yorgos Lanthimos, and her first film as director, from Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters, has learned from both: flat delivery, bodies that move as though drilled, a family that treats the rest of the world as a rumour. It is well made and well acted, and for most of its first hour it is properly unsettling. It then heads for a reveal that a fair number of viewers will have worked out ahead of it, and spends its last stretch confirming what we already suspected.
The sisters are the film, and Labed has cast them well. Pascale Kann plays September with her chin up and her arms loose, a girl who has never once been told no and would not have heard it. Mia Tharia plays July smaller, always half a step behind, watching her sister’s mouth for the next instruction. They share a bed, a wardrobe and, most of the time, a sentence. The game gives the film its title and its engine: September says, and July does, and the commands get worse. One early order, given in a level voice across a table and obeyed before it has quite finished, made us go cold. Nobody raises a voice. That is the point, and Labed knows it.
Rakhee Thakrar’s Sheela is the third person in the house and the loneliest, a mother who has lost the thread of her own daughters, and when things go wrong she goes to bed. Thakrar plays her with a tired patience that keeps threatening to curdle and never quite does. The film is honest about how a mother might end up frightened of her own children and ashamed of being frightened, and it does not ask us to like her for it.
The move to Ireland is where the craft earns its keep. Lauren Kelly’s production design gives the Irish house bare plaster, dark timber and rooms that seem to have been emptied rather than furnished, and Balthazar Lab lights them so the daylight looks second-hand, as though it had come through several other windows first. Saileóg O’Halloran puts the girls in shared, mismatched clothes that look handed down from one to the other and back again. Johnnie Burn’s music sits low under everything, closer to the hum of the house than to a score, and it is the reason the silences work. Bettina Böhler cuts hard, dropping whole hours between shots so that we are never sure how long the family has been shut in there.
The trouble is the story underneath. Johnson’s novel keeps its cards close; the film shows its hand by degrees, and around the hour mark we knew where it was going. We were not annoyed by that, at first. Plenty of good films let you see the end coming and make the arrival count. This one arrives, stops, and explains. The last twenty minutes replay what we had understood, in a slower tempo and with the meaning underlined, and the dread the first hour had built drains out through the gap. We left the cinema deflated rather than shaken, which is not what the opening promised.
The world outside the sisters is thin, too. Cal O’Driscoll’s John and Niamh Moriarty’s Jennifer are there to be stared at by the girls and then to leave, and the film is not much interested in what Ireland thinks of the three English arrivals in the big empty house. That may be the intention, a family so sealed that nobody else registers, but it leaves the middle of the film with only one room to be in.
Against the recent run of films about girls bound too tightly to each other, this is one of the better looking and less hysterical, and Kann and Tharia are the reason to see it. Bring some patience for the final act and do not go in expecting to be surprised. It runs 100 minutes and carries an 18 certificate, which the school scenes earn on their own.
