Criterion Corner: Sisters (1972) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Janus Films

Before becoming New Hollywood’s leading purveyor of the provocative and often violent suspense driven psychological and/or erotic thriller ala Dressed to Kill, Carrie, Obsession, Body Double and most recently Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma started out in scrappy low budget comedies starring Robert De Niro.  While Arrow Video put out a boxed set of his early films covered here, De Palma’s first real foray into anything resembling horror came in the form of his 1972 psychological thriller Sisters starring Margot Kidder, Charles Durning and recurring De Palma staple and Phantom of the Paradise star Bill Finley.  Inspired by the true account of Soviet Russian cojoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova and featuring some of the director’s earliest uses of his favorite leitmotif of split-screen, Sisters while being a low-budget American International Pictures affair marked De Palma’s first true masterwork and bona fide commercial success, amassing $1 million at the box office against a $500,000 budget and further canonized by The Criterion Collection and their recent 4K restoration.

 
Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) is an aspiring French-Canadian model and actress on a TV show who wins a dinner-for-two date with Black advertising salesman Philip Woode (Lisle Wilson).  After a night out on the two return to her Staten Island apartment for some sex, sleeping in to the next morning when she tells him her twin sister Dominique will be dropping by for a birthday visit.  Tasked with running to the local drugstore to refill a prescription for her and pick up a birthday cake for the occasion, Woode returns with the lit birthday cake only to be viciously stabbed to death by Dominique.  Before dying however (in a tour-de-force of split-screen) a neighbor from the building across the street, reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), witnesses the crime and believing authorities are ignoring it over racial profiling she mounts her own investigation into the murder and the mystery of the cojoined twins.

 
Predating the dueling multiple personality disorders and androgyny of Dressed to Kill and featuring De Palma’s trademark uses of editing and framing while still being somewhat footed in the groundwork of his regional independent comedies, Sisters from its terrifying opening credits montage of fetuses filmed under a microscope set to screeching Bernard Herrmann strings announced the arrival of a new kind of De Palma picture.  Entrenched in psychological warfare and tropes of the Hitchcockian thriller filled with many twists and turns while carrying over some of his snarky comedy from before, the film co-authored by De Palma and Louisa Rose boasting sharply defined milky cinematography by Forbidden Zone cameraman Gregory Sandor, Sisters is a visually pleasing mixture of bloody birthday cakes and masked murders brandishing blades.  An early regional horror role for Margot Kidder which ultimately plays to the strengths of Bill Finley the leading actor of his next film Phantom of the Paradise.  From his Brion James-like bug eyes to his gaunt figure and always past-level-eleven acting, Finley could shoulder the whole of Sisters by himself if he wanted to. 

 
Initially premiering at Filmex in November 1972 before being given a wide theatrical release by American International Pictures in April 1973, the film opened to rave reviews from critics and the film played all the way into November of that year.  Widely regarded (particularly by Roger Ebert) as an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, the film garnered awards from the US Film Festival in Dallas followed by Margot Kidder taking home the Best Actress award from the Atlanta International Film Festival.  In 2006 the film was remade by Douglas Buck and though it was produced by Edward R. Pressman of the 1972 De Palma film, it was ultimately dumped on DVD and was further met with mixed critical reception.  In recent years following a Warner Home Video tape release in 1980, the film eventually was canonized by The Criterion Collection in the year 2000 with a DVD disc premiere.  Circa 2018, Criterion upgraded their release once again with a new 4K restored Blu-ray disc release.  In De Palma’s oeuvre, it represents a unique transitional period between his regional comedies and his foray into contemporary mainstream suspense horror and thus remains one of his very best psychological thrillers.

--Andrew Kotwicki