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DIRECTED BY: Brian De Palma
FEATURING: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, William Finley, Charles Durning, Lisle Wilson
PLOT: A reporter witnesses a murder through the window of a nearby apartment, but her investigation leads her to a mysterious pair of conjoined twins with a dark and disturbing past.
COMMENTS: Brian De Palma loves Alfred Hitchcock. Everyone knows that. Sure, he’s capable of turning a Stephen King novel into a horror classic or an old TV spy show into a Tom Cruise-led blockbuster, but one thing we know for sure is that, once he got over his reputation as a comedy director, there’s nothing he’d rather do than a slavish impersonation of the Master of Suspense. Want proof? All you need to do is look at Body Double. Or Blow Out. Or the twisty thriller that made his name, Sisters.
The thing is, when you actually watch Sisters, what quickly becomes apparent is that De Palma is in conversation with Hitchcock as much as he is in thrall to him. Alfred Eaker compared De Palma to “a free jazz artist, filtering, reworking, improvising, and expanding on a body of filmmakers, which includes Hitchcock (among many others) to craft postmodern compositions that often are warmer and (as blasphemous as it may be to some) more startlingly original than the master.” Eaker also calls Sisters one of the best films of the decade. High praise, but quite defensible given the genuine shocks, eerie backstory, sprinter’s pace, and uncomfortable laughs the film still delivers. In the great tradition of low-budget horror flicks that rise above due to their cleverness and wit, Sisters is a welcome surprise.
Sisters does wear its forebears on its sleeve, with allusions to Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo among the most recognizable (to say nothing of the unmistakable sounds of Bernard Herrmann, who De Palma lured out of semi-retirement to lend his trademark screeching violins to the soundtrack), but the student demonstrates more facility with modern sensibilities than the Master, with powerful insights into racism and misogyny, comfort with sexuality, and willingness to indulge the supernatural. Most notably, he’s found a subject that would absolutely appeal to Hitchcock, turning the true story of the conjoined Krivoshlyapova twins into Kidder’s pretty girl with a very dark past. Where Hitchcock made do with doppelgängers and confused identities, De Palma uses a genuine medical curiosity as his launchpad.
Mind you, none of this theft homage would mean a thing if the film didn’t work on its own terms. De Palma opens with a classic bit of misdirection, aping a “Candid Camera”-like show to introduce our charming hero couple, coquettish Kidder with her Québécois accent and babe-in-the-woods demeanor and the charming, unsuspecting Wilson. Their romantic whirlwind occupies the first third of the film. Wilson is an almost perfect gentleman, while Kidder tries to explain away her unusually possessive ex-husband (Finley, whose Slugworthian vibes never let up). If De Palma steals anything from Hitchcock, it’s the value of a full-blown paradigm shift that justifies admitting no one after the first act.
The film sputters a bit in Act II as the baton is handed over to Salt, who is a fine heroine but suffers from the script’s need to isolate her by setting her adrift in a sea of backstory and mansplainers. (Fun Easter egg: the headline of the news clipping from her column adorning her back wall reads, “Why We Call Them Pigs.”) It’s the final act, when she finally discovers the strange truth of Danielle and Dominique’s unusual condition and upbringing, that pays off in the form of the one scene that owes nothing to Hitchcock: a nightmare sequence in which Salt imagines herself as Kidder’s conjoined twin and gets the scoop on just what screwed up the twins so many years ago. It’s a moment that DePalma gets to claim all for himself.
It’s hard to deny that Sisters is De Palma doing Hitchcock. The parallels are just too obvious, right through to the final joke of the unclaimed MacGuffin. The truth, though, is that he does Hitchcock extremely well, with a freshness and modernity that the Master’s later works struggle to capture. If this is mere copycattery, audiences were right to demand more of it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Jim Wolfe. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
De Palma’s Phantom is not content with a sole source: strands from “Frankenstein,” “The Picture of Dorian Grey,” “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” and Psycho are woven into a glittering glam horror extravaganza staging of “Faust.”