Sissy is a 2022 Australian Slasher Horror Comedy film directed and written by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes. Barlow also stars as one of the co-leads.
Cecilia AKA "Sissy" (Aisha Dee) is a successful social media influencer who one day runs into her former best friend, Emma (Barlow). Invited to a bachelorette weekend, Cecilia soon finds herself stuck at a remote cabin with her former childhood bully, Alex (Emily De Margheriti) and develops a taste for revenge...
The film premiered on the streaming service Shudder in 2022 and later had a theatrical release in the same year.
Previews: Trailer
This film contains examples of:
- Arc Words:
- "It was an accident."
- "You are a good person."
- Accidental Murder: Alex accidentally bashes Emma's face in when she runs in with a crutch, attacking after thinking she was after Cecilia.
- Asshole Victim: Most of the people Cecilia kills are shown to be rude and obnoxious to her, with the two big exceptions being Fran and Emma, who are sympathetic to her plight (at least until realizing there’s something seriously wrong with her).
- Bad "Bad Acting": Cecilia attempts to have a shocked reaction when Jaime accidentally uncovers Cecilia's corpse. It doesn't work.
- The Bad Guy Wins: While Cecilia is a good deal more sympathetic than most instances of this trope, she still kills everyone who mocked her at the party and successfully frames the deceased Alex for the massacre, which causes her fame to skyrocket and even gets her a book deal.
- Bad Influencer: Alex is mentioned to be an influencer and is quite vapid and hostile. Cecilia is mentioned to be an even bigger influencer than her, and she ends up committing straight-up murder many times.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Played straight when Cecilia beats herself up, nothing beyond a bloodied nose impacting her looks. Subverted to hell and back with everyone else, notably Tracy, Fran, and Emma.
- Big Damn Heroes: Cruelly subverted. Alex comes back in the nick of time and intervenes in the climactic fight, but she accidentally kills the innocent Emma, who she was trying to save. The cop arrives and kills Alex right after, sealing Cecilia's alibi.
- Black Comedy: Oh yes.
- One particular moment has Jamie urinate on Alex's makeshift grave while high as a kite.
- Another has Tracy pouring out a decanter of wine while watching a trashy Love Island-style show, while Cecilia cuts into her skin with a branch to fake an injury, in subdued agony as she does so.
- Alex calling the police while screaming frantically results in the operator confusing her for a drunkard. The battery dies before any meaningful help can be granted.
- Bookends: The film begins and ends with Cecilia's mantra she echoes to her fans.
- Catapult Nightmare: Cecilia has one near the beginning, after having a nightmare where Alex forces her hand into her scarred cheek.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The Elon Mask facemask that Cecilia promotes at the beginning of the film comes back when Cecilia kills Tracy.
- What gives away Cecilia as the killer to Emma? The half of the friendship necklace she stole from Alex.
- Jaime's crutch. It's what Cecilia uses to help kill him and Alex later finds it while crawling through the wild. She later uses it to accidentally kill Emma.
- Cruel and Unusual Death:
- Tracy dies after falling into the tub and getting her hair sucked into the drain, scalping her.
- Fran dies when Cecilia speeds up the car and suddenly brakes, sending her flying through the windshield. However, she's still alive after the crash, which results in Cecilia then driving the car over her head. And we get a close up in slow motion.
- Emma is killed by a crazed Alex in a blind rage, who uses a crutch to beat her head into a pulp.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- Cecilia's reaction to Alex calling her names as a kid? To stab her in the cheek with a trowel, which leaves a scar on her cheek to the present.
- Cecilia kills Fran for trying to "take" Emma away from her to America.
- Downer Ending: Cecilia murders everyone at the party, who while vapid, were mostly innocent, while she gets off scot-free by making herself out to be the victim. This results in her following blooming to the millions and nets her a book deal.
- Foreshadowing:
- In one flashback, when young Emma produces the trowel to bury her and Sissy's time capsule with, it's shot exactly like she's pulling a knife. Not long after, Sissy used that very trowel to stab Alex deep in the cheek during her first violent breakdown.
- On the way to Alex's house, the car passes a dead kangaroo on the road, and then Cecilia hits another, with Fran electing to crush its head with the car to put it out of its misery. Cecilia will later pick up Fran on the side of the road, and in a breakdown, sends her flying out the windshield, dying on the road. She echoes Fran's actions by driving over Fran to end her misery and complete the murder.
- Cecilia is haunted by a Spooky Painting in Alex's house. Late in the film, it's revealed she sees the jeering face of young Alex bullying her when she looks at the painting.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: What drives Cecilia to murder? Hearing Emma's group of friends mock her.
- Hypocrite: Cecilia gives a monologue about how Emma is "fake" and makes "everyone else feel like shit" by acting so high and mighty, while she herself lacks emotional sincerity or self-awareness and peddles unqualified mental health advice and considers herself a good person for it.
- Improvised Weapon: A crutch is used as a bludgeoning tool, to quite a messy degree when Alex kills Emma.
- Insistent Terminology: It's not Sissy, it's Cecilia. Alex ruined the nickname "Sissy" for her by using it as an insult and inciting her first disturbing act of violence.
- Ironic Echo: Fran runs over an injured kangaroo under the pretense, "it's the humane thing to do." Cecilia later kills her the exact same way while saying the same thing.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Alex is cruel and does not tolerate Cecilia, but given their shared past where Cecilia physically scarred her in a brutal attack, Alex has zero reason to be kind or welcoming to her. Alex's points about Cecilia's influencer work are also sound, pointing out that she's unqualified to practice mental health assistance and functionally isn't doing much for the world.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: A surviving Alex returns to the house at the height of Cecilia's breakdown and starts swinging a crutch to deliver a merciless beating. Too bad she was beaten so badly her vision is still impaired, leading her to murder her fiancée Emma by mistake, not Cecilia. Cecilia delivers a chilling "thank you" when Alex realizes what just happened—she's validated Cecilia's intended cover story about Alex being the psychotic killer this whole time, and a cop is there as a witness who then kills Alex to rescue Cecilia.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: How is Emma rewarded by inviting her friend to her bachelorette party? By learning her fiance died and getting her head caved in with a crutch by the host.
- Not Quite Dead: Alex is thought dead after getting bashed in the back of the head with a rock and getting half-buried. She later wakes up, though with a massive head wound, and crawls back to the house in time to accidentally beat Emma to death.
- Oh, Crap!: Poor Fran has an insane nonverbal reaction akin to this when she realises that Cecilia intends to run her over.
- Police Are Useless: In two major ways, the police inadvertently screw the situation to the worst outcome. First, Alex tries to make an emergency call only to be mistaken for a drunk harasser—by the time the cop actually takes it seriously, the phone Alex is using dies. Later, Emma calls the police more coherently, only for the cop's arrival to be late enough that he sees Alex after murdering Emma by mistake and kills her, letting the true murderer Cecilia escape unsuspected and build a life as the "sole survivor" of the massacre she was truly responsible for.
- The Sociopath: Alex calls Cecilia a psychopath early in the film. The events of the film pretty much prove her as an example of this instead, solely invested in how she's perceived by the masses and emotionless toward the people she kills. However, unlike most examples, Cecilia does not have much superficial charm nor a skill for manipulation—she's very awkward in-person with people and does very badly at hiding what she's done.
- Spooky Painting: Cecilia is unnerved by a caricatured portrait in Alex's living room. Later, she gets reminders of young Alex's face from the portrait and it's seen animated during a hallucination where it repeats Alex's taunts.
- Rich Bitch: Alex is a textbook example of this, owning a lavish home while being incessantly mean.
- Sanity Slippage: Cecilia clearly has some kind of interpersonal disorder to start with, but she gets worse and worse as the film progresses, with her seeing hallucinations and regressing into her mental "safe space" of beliefs where she and Emma are destined companions.
- Self-Harm: Cecilia beats the shit out of herself while setting up that she was attacked by Alex.
- Sole Survivor: The only person alive at the end of the spree is Cecilia, who succesfully framed Alex as the murderer and is living off the narrative that she was the lone survivor of her massacre.
- Take That!: Cecilia and Alex are scathing indictments of particularly obnoxious influencers. Cecilia particularly as it's lampshaded that she pretty much relies on pseudoscience to lull her fans into a sense of mental and physical enlightenment while health practitioners such as Fran are overlooked.
- Twofer Token Minority: Fran is a lesbian and is also black.
- Villain Protagonist: Cecilia is this, a sociopathic murderer who is obsessed with her standing on social media.
- Walking Spoiler: It's pretty hard to discuss this film without disclosing the fact that Cecilia is The Sociopath and begins killing everyone.
- Yandere: Cecilia is this for Emma.
