I Watch Films: Sisters (1972)

 

Sisters (1973)

Phillipe Wood is on a voyeur-themed prank reality TV show; he wins a dinner at a swanky restaurant. He take the woman who pranked him, Canadian model and actress Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder). Afterwards they go to her place in Staten Island, and have sex. The next morning Danielle manages to lose her pills. Telling Phillipe her sister Dominique is coming for her birthday, she asks him to collect the pills, which he does, also getting a cake. Returning he’s brutally stabbed by Dominique (also Margot Kidder).

Phillipe writes in blood at the window and is spotted by Grace Collier from across the apartment block. She calls the police. Danielle’s ex-husband Emil has arrived, called by her in distress when she ran out of pills, he helps her clean up and hide the body. When the detectives and Grace arrive, there’s nothing to be seen. Grace is a journalist who has previously been critical of the police so they assume she’s up to something and leave.

Grace gets her editor to put her on the story, saying that the police aren’t bothering because Phillipe was black. She investigates Danielle’s past, also gets a private investigator to break in; he reckons the sofa bed is where they’re hiding the body. Grace discovers that Danielle and Dominique were in fact conjoined twins, famous for a while, Emil as the doctor who treated them. Then something happened with the operation that separated them and they vanished from records.

It's stylish, in many cases an homage to Hitchcock. Split-screen shots, for example following Grace as she goes down from her block, across the courtyard and then up, while Emil and Danielle clean up the body and blood. A lot of voyeurism, from the initial TV show, Grace watching from her window, she and the investigator watching the apartment, not to mention the sensational coverage of the conjoined twins. And some weird bits that seem a bit outlandish in this gritty 1970s film rather than the glamour of Hitchcock’s 50s to early 60s films.

Watch This: Clever, stylish, confident updated homage to Hitchcock thrillers
Don’t Watch This: Mannered, occasionally stylised and turning to the ludicrous