Film Review: SISSY: Social Media and Social Anxiety Blend in Murky Australian Horror [SXSW 2022]

Sissy Review

Sissy (2022) Film Review from the 29th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, starring Aisha Dee, Yerin Ha, Lucy Barrett, Hannah Barlow, Victoria Hopkins, Alea O’Shea, Emily De Margheriti, Darcie Irwin-Simpson, Daniel Monks, Ryan Panizza, Jared Jekyll, and Michael Slater.

We frequently praise stories for relying on “shades of gray” in the moral alignments of both their characters and their narratives, but Sissy makes for a more difficult case as those shades are nearly indistinguishable from one another. They bleed together into a murky stew of revenge, regret, justice, and abhorrence that’s deeply unsettling but also slyly intriguing to wade through.

Cecilia (Aisha Dee), a woman in her late 20s, is a social media influencer who preaches mental health awareness and calming meditation rituals to her 200,000 followers. She lives a lonely and cluttered life on the outskirts of Australia’s capital, but her company and validation comes through interacting with her followers. Her phone’s pings of likes and DMs tamp down her anxiety and raise her serotonin levels, allowing her to get through the day in one stable piece.

On a chance pharmacy run she crosses paths with Emma (Hannah Barlow), her childhood best friend who she hasn’t seen in nearly 15 years. Overcome with joy and wanting to reconnect, Hannah invites Cecilia (whom she used to call “Sissy”) to her bachelorette weekend with her fiancée Fran (Lucy Barrett) and her other fashionable and reality-TV-obsessed friends. While she’s nervous to reestablish a former friendship that ended in controversy, Cecilia tepidly agrees to come, but she’s soon side-swiped by learning that the party is being hosted by Alex (Emily De Margheriti) – the center of the controversy.

Over the next few days Cecilia’s anxiety bubbles up uncontrollably, with unresolved tensions between her and Alex triggering unforgiven past traumas that she’s since tried to escape. It’s a tale of social awkwardness as nerve-grating horror – that is, until it manifests itself in a violent and ludicrously tangible fashion.

On the outset the film may feel obfuscating, as it’s tempting to watch this satire of self-help gurus, social-media-based mental-health pop psychology, and modern anxiety mediation as an outright denunciation of such things – or even worse, a stigmatization of such things as the roots of societal ills (its “#triggered” tagline and the co-opted implications that phrase has carried throughout the past few years certainly doesn’t do the film’s marketing campaign many favors). But that sole takeaway would ignore the positive effects and goodwill that such things have generated for Cecilia (not to mention actual, real-life people, too) and how, up until the events of the film, she’s been able to craft an identity that she’s finally proud of, fully in control of, and can wholeheartedly admire.

Sissy’s topics of anxiety and moderating one’s well-being are not so much presented as causes for Cecilia’s eventual actions, but rather catalysts for the narrative’s wild turns: moments of contention with external parties that lead to wild unravelings in-line with the veracity the genre demands. What Barlow and her co-writer/-director Kane Senes tap into is the uncomfortable truth that many aspects of life are paradoxical and contradictory: people (like Cecilia and her friends) and things (like her social media presence and self-care) are simultaneously forces of both “good” and “bad”, privy to manipulation, with moral and ethical delineations that are not always clear. Barlow and Senes not only know this but cheekily play into it, coming off as offensive before morphing into greater thematic and even empathetic complexity (Paul Verhoeven would be proud).

This ethical translucence is mirrored in the film’s technical craftsmanship, with the effects and the music playing into an entrancing vibe. In particular, Kenneth Lampl’s original score first comes across as overbearing but it begins to make sense as a sort of personification of Cecilia’s own dissociation from her surroundings to help drown out or mitigate her anxiety. It’s accentuated kitsch that melds with camp horror, making it play silly, scary, and ever-so-slightly queer.

Granted, the film’s second half doesn’t quite match the heightened social-anxiety horror of the first, and some of the violence, though all audacious, feels excessive and (based on the characters involved) unnecessarily cruel. It also doesn’t help that, while the prosthetics are quite good in the previously-stated campy sense, the moments of CGI are garish and sorely lacking.

Still, Sissy is so subtly shocking in its satire and scares that it can’t help but tickle your sick fancy. Critical but not offensive, silly but not soulless, Barlow and Senes’ new film is sure to piss a lot of people off or find those who champion it for the wrong reasons. But for everyone who sees it as it is – that is, the messy musings on the miasma of the modern age – please continue to like, comment, and subscribe.

Rating: 7/10

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