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Margot Kidder stars as Danielle, a French Canadian woman who has spent most of her life conjoined at the hip with her twin. Every so often since their separation she has crazy mood swings and needs medicine to suppress murderous convulsions. A reporter (Jennifer Salt) in an apartment across from her witnesses one of her mad moments and notices what appears to be a murder. She tries to convince the police to investigate but, partly because she’s a persistent nag, she can’t get anyone to believe her story. So she hires a private detective to solve the mystery.


In SISTERS the shocks aren’t too great and the blood factor is pretty tame -- especially compared with CARRIE, which De Palma made a few years after SISTERS – but it does build a good amount of suspense. Rather than gory details, De Palma tries to wade into Hitchcock waters with character development, plot twists, red herrings and scary psychological elements.


As usual too, De Palma visually and thematically references Hitchcock specifically from such great films as ROPE, REAR WINDOW and PSYCHO. And, as a sort of homage, he used Bernard Herrmann -- who was one of Hitchcock’s regulars -- to score the film.


What De Palma does that’s different from Hitchcock is add more of a lurid element and a few more showy cinematic tricks. For instance, he uses a split screen in a couple of scenes early on and even though they have a cheap quality they are used sparingly enough to help rather than hurt the story.


The acting is as good as you would expect for a low budget horror film, although Kidder using a simple French accent is a bit of a stretch.


What’s good too is that De Palma isn’t interested only in a misogynistic tale of horror or a freak show. Instead he suggests that bad doctors may have more to do with people becoming mad than just our genetic physical, psychological make-up. And it’s just that idea that makes the film demented amusement in the end.


The film print looks almost brand new and is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen and the Dolby Digital 2.0 mono sound is good. Criterion has done a great job in restoring the split screen scenes which were previously unavailable in video.

Concerning the supplements, the people at Criterion tell me that De Palma refused to do an interview or a director commentary for the film. As a result Criterion uses a lot of screen text including an excellent interview with De Palma, a little piece about real conjoined twins from Russia (An influence for the film), a plethora of original art work one sheets and more than 200 photos from the shoot.-- Matt Langdon

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originally posted: 02/24/01 15:24:20
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