Aisha Dee plays Cecilia, a young woman who spends a lot of her time advising and inspiring people online. She promotes self-care and discusses mental health, advising her many followers that everyone is loved and everyone is special. Things change for Cecilia, however, when she bumps into an old friend named Emma (played by Hannah Barlow, who also helped co-write and co-direct the film). Cecilia and Emma used to be inseparable when they were children, back when Cecilia was called Sissy, and they immediately plan to spend some time together again. A road trip ensues, Cecilia joining Emma and others out to enjoy Emma’s bachelorette weekend, but when they all arrive at their final destination Cecilia finds out that Alex (Emily De Margheriti) is also in attendance. Alex and Cecilia have a history, and it’s not good. Tension rises, and Cecilia struggles to remember the kind of positive mantras that she would encourage others to live by.
Kane Senes is the other half of the co-writing and co-directing team here, and both he and Barlow walk themselves through a premise that is a dangerous minefield when it comes to the main subject matter. The film is about mental health, and uses the fragility of one character to kickstart things in a way that some may dislike, but it is also, in some ways, about a cathartic explosion of “karma”, the consequences of childhood bullying and trauma that arise when buried memories are brought back to the surface. This would be tricky enough in a straightforward horror, but Sissy also adds some very dark humour (as well as some uncomfortable cringe humour) in the mix. I cannot say how everyone will react to this, but I personally really enjoyed the whole thing, and was always ready to root for Cecilia, even as the situation continued to spiral further out of control. Because it sucks to have spent years with children who, for some reason or another, decided to make you the butt of a joke, or abuse, or just unworthy of being in whatever group you felt you could join. And I should now, having only just survived the hellscape of my high school years by the skin of my teeth. I'm not saying I would react to meeting any of those people as an adult in the way that Cecilia does, but I'm not going to pretend that seeing her "take a stand" wasn't incredibly satisfying, in terms of the movie viewing experience.
Dee is excellent in the lead role, a young woman who had hoped to keep her past behind her. She retains an optimism and positivity throughout the first half of the movie that lasts a lot longer than most people would have managed. Barlow is also very good, portraying her character as someone with good intentions, and a lack of full awareness when it comes to the complex mix of emotions she creates in someone she simply views as a friend she lost touch with. De Margheriti is the potential villain of the piece, although she could just as easily be an innocent victim, depending on how much stock you put into the childhood events that we are shown in various small flashbacks throughout the film, and she does good work. Other people onscreen are played by Daniel Monks, Yerin Ha, Lucy Barrett, and Shaun Martindale, among others, and everyone does a good job, but this is a film that remains very much focused on one main character, keeping us well aware of her mindset and struggle.
More about the plotting and character development than any excessive amount of visual style or trickery, the cinematography and score (former by Steve Arnold, latter by Kenneth Lampl) work well in complementing the core of the film, but I feel the need to single out the team in charge of the special effects for some extra praise. Not every bit of bloodshed is intense and insane, but there is at least one death scene that had me realising my jaw felt a bit slack as I was dumbfounded by the gore gag on display, and there are a few other moments that are as creative and impressive as they are bloody.
A complex film that is superficially very simple, I would advise anyone to approach Sissy with caution. But it's hard to deny how effectively it works as both a straightforward horror story and an exploration of the faultlines that remain in our psyche once they have been created there in our childhoods. The cracks, the scars, the long-gone bruises that can still be felt through a pulsating memory muscle that reactivates when aiming to warn someone of danger. The damage is always there, and it's clearly at the very heart of Cecilia, but we are all the sum of our parts. I hope other viewers can see things the same way I do. She is loved. She is special. She is enough. She is trying her best. We all are.
8/10
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