MIFF Session #3: SISSY

Two kids, Sissy and Emma, pledge enternal friendship on a home video. Years later, Sissy looks into our eyes and speaks words of comfort. She's become an influencer, preaching wellbeing to hundreds and thousands of fans worldwide. As she checks the pings of love responses her pupils expand from all the seratonin. Later at the chemist, she meets grown up Emma whose bright, wide staring close up sends far more enthusiasm than it receives. After starting with such devotion from the video we can fathom Sissy's (sorry, it's now Cecilia's) standoffishness. Maybe it's just the passage of time. Undaunted, Emma invites Cecilia to her engagement party and that's it. Well, no. 

As everyone is getting drunk and emboldened to wrestle each other for the karaoke mic, Emma and Cecilia find the old warmth and Emma extends an invitation to her hens retreat that weekend. Cecilia breaks and agrees. Then, step by step, Cecilia manages to wrong foot everyone else, and retreats to the background, unnoticed, having gone from great massive online love to this. There's also an old score which we've glimpsed in flashbacks; Alex, scarred from an childhood incident involving Cecilia, freaks at Cecilia's appearance at the chalet and doesn't let up. Flight or fight, Cissy?

Horror comedy usually falls on one side of the divide and stays there. Exceptions include Arsenic and Old Lace and Scream, separated by about fifty years. Capra's film works because he starts where he lives, in comedy and adds the spiky horror moods and references as the plot accelerates. Craven starts in his home territory of convincing horror and folds the comedy in until it's hard to tell the difference. Most attempts at the mix fail, usually giving it up for laughs. That's not a bad thing, American Werewolf in London and Whacko are still enjoyable movies, it's just that it shows how hard it is to sustain the balancing act. Both jokes and scares depend on tension and while the payoff of one differs from the other, they both need that clench to keep it fresh.

Sissy does a few things right here by using the social awkwardness as a fuel for suspense and some convincing and very funny social interactions which can turn sharply into discomfort. Then, when it's time for blood and gore, delivers gleefully on those. Themes of narcissism, true friendship or fame are clearly drawn and appropriately for a comedy writ large, the one thing we don't quite get when we need it most is horror movie tension. The first kill comes easily from the situation but others feel too drawn out to put all the dialogue in rather than complete the gag. One kill has no apparent motive, which robs it of stakes, and while the action of it works, feels included for the effect.

Too picky? Maybe. Perhaps I should just recall that this film's ancestors include the Scorsesean Ingrid Goes West, the post Trump Tragedy Girls which added genre shocks to what began and ended as satire. My screening included a Q&A with one of the directors, the producer and, very satisfyingly, the composer (a figure lamentably missing from most such festival occasions) who was very eloquent and accurate in describing his range from Giallo to Disney in scoring the film. One point that the producer made, and poignantly, was that to keep the film from becoming dated too quickly, they held back on representing social media technology as. And that's really the point. Regardless of how Sissy became Cecilia, she did, and the childhood she had was bound to bring its own issues to a reunion. At that level, Sissy is a stunner of a debut.