September Says Review

It’s a title with a powerful sense of what’s to come – and it reeks of menace. That reference to “Simon Says”, the age-old children’s game leaps out first, but underneath lies the sense of dominance and bullying. And the fact that the relationship at the centre of September Says is between sisters makes fills what unfolds on screen with the potential to be even more disturbing.

While the two teenagers, September (Pascale Kann) and July (Maria Tharia) aren’t twins, their co-dependent relationship immediately prompts thoughts of The Silent Twins (2022), which was based on the true life story of identical twins in South Wales. For her feature debut, director Ariane Labed has adapted Daisy Johnson’s 2020 gothic novel, Sisters, where the girls are also inseparable, want nothing to do with anybody else and have their own private way of communicating. Their story is built around a horrific incident at their school. For the first third, we see how they’re singled out: July is bullied, September comes to her rescue and is aggressive to anybody who comes near them. More significantly, she dominates her sister yet, after the confrontation, they move to an isolated house on the Irish coast and July seems to develop a sense of independence which makes September unhappy and troubles their mother, Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar).

The stage is set for a horrific climax, but what we get plays in a lower key and that’s down to the slow pacing of the film, which takes too long to get into the frequently promised strange territory. Instead, it lulls the audience to such an extent that they could easily miss the twist on the way – and when it arrives, it doesn’t have the impact that it really should. That jarring disconnect between the expectation of something horrific and the film’s slowness makes for an uneven watch, one moment demonstrating Labed’s potential as a director and the next showing that it has yet to be fulfilled.

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Her ability to create a foreboding atmosphere is impressive, as is the way she creates the fly-on-the-wall viewpoint with next to no soundtrack and relying instead on natural, ambient sounds. That sense of the ordinary and the unremarkable heightens the strange relationship between the two girls, giving the performances from Kann and Tharia the opportunity to flourish superbly. It’s an actor-focussed piece, and the cast delivers, yet there are times when Labed leans too heavily on other sources. The phrase “weird sisters” is never spoken but often implied, and that sense of “something wicked this way comes” is never far behind, both references to that most sinister of Shakespearean plays. There are even more nods in the direction of Stephen King – The Shining and Carrie in particular – which are so obvious as to be borderline clumsy.

It’s when she turns to the implicit and the subtle that she really scores. Their dead father gets a brief, single mention and the shadow of abuse looms large. And while the girls’ ages are never actually specified, we know they’re not twins yet there can’t be more than a year between them. The conclusion is the same. It’s a sign of what the film could have been, something genuinely original and consistently disturbing. As it stands, it’s not the slap in the face that July gives September – she’s told to, of course – but more of a light tap on the shoulder.