Sissy (2022) Review

Cecelia (Aisha Dee) is an influencer living her best life, entertaining her large following with YouTube videos such as “Making friends with hyperventilation” and putting a somewhat troubled past behind her. However, a chance meeting with her childhood BFF – well, clearly not forever – Emma (Hannah Barlow) has her reminiscing about their once unbreakable bond.

It’s not long before Sissy, sorry, Cecelia is invited to a boozy night out at the karaoke and then scores an invitation to Emma’s hen weekend. What Cecelia doesn’t know is that her school bully Alex (Emily De Margheriti) is still a close friend of Emma’s and is also going to be there. Confronted with the events of her schooldays, Cecelia’s carefully constructed media front begins to crack and things are going to get bloody…

Dee is superb in the title role, every frame steeped in her star quality, whether she’s promoting dubious wellness products such as the “Elon Mask” (!) or struggling to keep her inner rage in check as she sees her rekindled relationship with Emma coming under serious threat. The screenplay, co-written by Barlow and Kate Senes (they also share directing duties), draws an amusing but also disturbing portrait of so many people who, post-Covid, have parlayed their position of online influence into a career as a dangerously unqualified mental health advisor.

It isn’t just social media woo woo that comes in for a skewering as the fickle friendship circles of both school kids and adults are exposed for the brittle alliances they are, where even the most harmonious pairings on the surface are prone to jealously and backstabbing – or stabbing in other places, this is a twisted take on the slasher movie, after all.

Even as matters spiral wildly out of control, the party guests are too wrapped up in themselves or have just had enough of everyone else’s shit to realise what’s going on until extremely late in the day. All the while, Cecelia’s mantra of “I am loved, I am special, I am enough” and her constant checking for reassuring messages of affirmation such as “DM us for collab” are used as a shield from the gruesome reality of the situation.

Taking a subject with such worldwide relevance, there’s still room for a pleasingly Aussie edge to some of the humour. A first act sequence involving that most Antipodean of accidents, a collision between car and kangaroo, ultimately drives the demise of one particular character. In another sequence, a shot of a claret-spattered corpse cuts to a grisly close-up of a pie being splattered with ketchup. The classic sitcom Kath And Kim is referenced too, which scores bonus points in my book.

The last third sees Cecilia finally falling from her place in the Internet fandom cloud and hitting the earth with a resounding bump and at this point the satirical edge is blunted in terms of a more conventional, bloody, horror throwdown but even this move to familiar ground is never less than entertaining, displaying an agreeable lack of sentimentality towards major protagonists and providing a not unexpected but nicely staged and darkly comic payoff.

A female-centric project in all aspects, the lack of hunky, hetero hero types – the male police officer is a) a peripheral character and b) a liability – is only a problem if you want it to make it one. Sissy is a film which is not afraid of showing women to be complicated, flawed and just as prone to being self-centred and awful as men are. Who’d a think it? It’s also a bloody good time, delivering big laughs in between the gory set-pieces.

A warning about the cult of online personality and the damage it can do to both followers and followed plus a warning about the consequences of bullying plus a warning about the expectations and obsessions of close friendships, that’s a lot of warnings for one film. Luckily, Sissy approaches all of these topics with sassy humour, aided by the finely honed comic timing of its accomplished cast and a sparkling lead performance from Aisha Dee who, if there’s any justice, should be a superstar in years to come. See this or I’ll make a long, tedious vlog about it.

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