We all have former friends whom we treated carelessly, unkindly, especially during our formative years. Maybe we realised that other kids thought they were lame. Maybe they got clingy, and we mistook their pitiable insecurity for smothering. Maybe we just outgrew them. Maybe they stabbed our new best friend in the side of the face with a gardening trowel. You know, any of these.

Sure, there’s some guilt over how we handled the situation, and what lingering effects it may have had on that person. But maybe it’s not such a good idea to work out that guilt during your hen’s weekend, when you just ran into the person in the chemist yesterday for the first time in 15 years, and when the hen’s weekend is taking place at the very person’s house who still has the scar on her cheek from that gardening trowel. Especially if you don’t even tell that person she’s coming.

Sissy is founded on such poor decision making – narratively, technically, tonally. There’s a sharp critique and/or satire struggling to get out of the new film by Australian writer-directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, one that also throws its arms around the emptiness of reality TV and social media. It’s crippled, though, by narrative turns that strain credibility, performed by unlikable characters, the one of whom we should hope to like the best being the biggest disaster among them.

Cecilia (Aisha Dee) is now an influencer with 200,000 followers – exactly 200,000? that seems unlikely – but when she was a 12-year-old girl called Sissy, she just liked to have fun with her best friend Emma. They had a cute story that since their mums were friends, they first met as occupants of adjacent wombs, and their friendship has blossomed into a pact to grow old together. They bury a time capsule of the things they loved at this tender age. Such pacts are not easily kept, and being 12 is hard. Sissy’s increasing inability to relate to other girls caused Emma to give the other half of matching “best friend” necklaces to another girl, Alex, who was a bully to Sissy, to add insult to injury – and ended up paying for it.

Having remade herself and become an inarguable success on social media, Cecilia gets thrown back into that headspace when she bumps into the adult Emma (played by the director, Barlow). She tries to avoid Emma seeing her, since she instantly comprehends the emotional stakes it has for her. But Emma does see her and immediately invites her to a karaoke night in honour of her and her fiancée, Fran (Lucy Barrett), which will be followed by their hen’s weekend. Cecilia is reluctant to accept either invitation, but there’s that little unresolved part of her that wants to.

Suffice it to say, the grown Alex (Emily De Margheriti) is none too pleased when Cecilia rocks up to her house in the bush, since she still gets that reminder of Sissy’s gardening trowel every time she looks in the mirror. Two other friends, Jamie (Daniel Monks) and Tracey (Yerin Ha), are along for what you know is going to be a ride, since this film is categorised as horror.

Sissy has the misfortune of coming out just a few months after Bodies Bodies Bodies, but even without that superior point of comparison, it would come up short of its potential. The difficulty is built into the basic setup and construction. Aisha Dee is incorrectly cast in the role of a possible psychopath, which is not to say that she doesn’t have the range for it – her scenes that require displays of derangement are credible enough. But the actress doesn’t strike us as someone capable of holding onto the sort of dangerous obsession the film relies on to create tension, which is especially the case when we first meet her as her younger self captured on video, played by April Blasdall. From the first moments, if we have a basic idea of the premise, we’re unsettled by a decision that feels emotionally uncharitable as well as thematically dubious. If we’re talking Sissy, Sissy Spacek’s character in Carrie could also be the model here.

Movies should be allowed to take any characters in any directions they want, as long as they support those decisions as the movie goes along, but Sissy falls down in this regard as well. It’s one of those movies where accidents and misunderstandings snowball, and in order to dramatise this, the scenes must be staged in such a way as to make these turns of events believable. In one example, in a scene involving two characters in a bathroom, the directors must execute an abrupt shift in the power dynamics in order to work out the spatial logistics for the complicated payoff they want to achieve. In another, a character engages in a case of mistaken identity that has about a zero percent chance of actually happening, given how triggering these characters are for each other.

Sissy clearly wants to push the envelope in its quest for an outrageous tone, but it mismanages this through gruesome violence. On some level it is clear the directors want to showcase their old school use of practical effects, but those effects are at times so extreme that they just become a turn-off. There’s one usage of practical effects that’s actually laughable, though it’s not clear that’s what they were going for, as it involves an obvious dummy thrown over the side of a cliff, its limbs bouncing around like a straw scarecrow let loose from its post. You get the sense Sissy also takes inspiration from the 2009 Australian horror The Loved Ones, but doesn’t master the tone like that one did.

The gruesome violence is supposed to be righteous punishment for characters who are all pretty terrible. Even the ones who think they’re well meaning are fatally tone deaf in a way that makes them even worse than the ones who are just bitchy. (And there’s no gender judgment in the term “bitchy” since the one male character is actually the bitchiest.) Any real messages are lost because the movie thinks so little of the people it’s having us watch for 100 minutes. And that means that the evident skill of Barlow and Senes, which does poke through on a regular basis, is ultimately shrouded by cynicism and misanthropy.

 

Sissy is currently playing in cinemas.