Movie Review: Sissy
There’s a curious contradiction at the center of social media. For an idea that seems to put heavy stock on the importance of socializing, the very act of doing so online can be a very lonely affair. As such, the image we create online is often severely curated, a sanitized version of ourselves that purges the less appealing aspects of our personas. Writer/director duo Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes’ satirical horror movie Sissy puts this contradiction front and center to dissect our relationship with social media and what happens when our online profiles become scrutinized in the real world. Turns out a lot of blood can be spilled on the topic.
Sissy follows Cecilia (brilliantly played by Aisha Dee), a successful mental health influencer that creates mindfulness content. One day she runs into her childhood friend Emma (played by Hannah Barlow) and is reluctantly thrust into in-person socializing with her and her new group of friends. Tensions arise when we learn there’s a deeply rooted traumatic event that made the two friends drift apart when they were kids, an event that involves another girl who used to bully Cecilia but is now Emma’s bestie.
Things get complicated when Cecilia is invited by Emma to join her fiancé and a few friends to go to a cabin in the woods to celebrate their bachelorette party. Once there, Cecilia learns the cabin belongs to the same girl, now grown up, that used to bully her when she was little. What was originally meant to be an opportunity to reconnect with a lost friend quickly becomes a darkly comic descent into trauma, social media identities, and deaths both accidental and intentional.
The movie is, in essence, a clever deconstruction of Cecilia, a slow unraveling of her real self and of her influencer self. It’s made obvious quite early that each version of Cecilia is at odds with the other. Whereas Cecilia the influencer comes off as a calm and collected person that’s emotionally mature and stable, offline Cecilia is a quiet and somewhat awkward person that keeps to herself and only socializes via her phone. Content creation isn’t just her job, it’s her life. Emma’s presence disrupts this as it forces the real Cecilia to get behind the wheel, traumas and anxieties laid bare for all to see.
Sissy succeeds at showing how current generations live in a constant exchange of personalities that are then equally scrutinized both online and offline. The message hits hard thanks to Aisha Dee’s performance, an emotionally nuanced showcase that presents audiences with the darkly funny consequences of bringing digital behaviors into the real world.
As Cecilia’s traumas are forced to the surface by her childhood bully, the mental health influencer starts to show the cracks on her own psyche. It’s an idea that frames online content creators as the spiritual successors of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, substituting the classic horror character’s mysterious transformation elixir for social media platforms. Cecilia makes it clear throughout that she values her digital presence more than her real one. Harlow and Senes use this to lay the breadcrumbs that guide the story towards its very funny and clever deaths.
Sissy sneaks up on you with what it decides to make fun of and illicit laughs from. Each of the characters Cecilia interacts with is pushed to a point just shy of caricature to make them embody the least pleasant parts of social media interactions. It’s as if they were walking like/dislike buttons, offering opinions on Cecilia’s character with the scorn of an anonymous troll in a comments section. They become the things that are wrong with the internet, in part, with Cecilia being the troubled but also troubling victim at the center.
On a quick note, I was glad to see the movie not give in to 80’s horror nostalgia. At points, I expected a neon-soaked homage to the slashers of yesteryear, but the story has a wider vision that isn’t content to simply settle on genre references and Easter eggs. The same can be said of its score (by Kenneth Lampl) and musical selection. It’s all set to capture the present rather than a modernized version of the past.
Barlow and Senes have one of the best horror movies of the year on their hands with Sissy, led by an astonishing performance by Aisha Dee. It puts social media, woke stereotypes, and digital anxieties in full display to satirize them in a way that invites discussion. I for one keep coming back to it, thinking about Cecilia and all the chaos that she brought with her by the simple fact of having an online presence that hides her traumas and presents an entirely different person than the one that walks among real people. Goes to show just how much horror lies in the things that we leave out of our social media profiles.
Sissy is currently streaming on Shudder.
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