Sisters: Psycho-Thriller, Qu’est-ce Que C’est?

In 1973, the arrival of Sisters, the first film by Brian De Palma that is recognizably his, almost concurrently with the release of Frenzy, the penultimate feature by Alfred Hitchcock, incited heretical talk among cinephiles. Many argued that the former was superior to—and, curiously, more Hitchcockian than—the latter. At the time, I thought those movie geeks were being provocative and/or blasphemous. With distance, I’ve come around to their way of thinking. That U-turn was, for me, a first brush with George Bernard Shaw’s insight that all truths begin as blasphemies.

Although Sisters was De Palma’s seventh feature, it announced the arrival of an intriguing storyteller and stylist who found his métier in the psychological thriller. Beyond its overt references, his movie’s way of consciously mining the reptile brain to unnerving effect was indeed Hitchcockian.

Mastering his craft on free-form, absurdist comedies like Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), De Palma had initially introduced himself as a maker of topical counterculture films linked by the movement’s philosophy, “Make love, not war.” (And along the way, he gave Jill Clayburgh and Robert De Niro their first movie roles.) Sisters was a departure, a fully realized thriller that staked his claim to the genre. It stands as the foundational film in his career.

As De Palma tells it (in the 2015 documentary De Palma, by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow), what brought him to this movie was the opportunity to work out his problems as a storyteller. In Greetings and Hi, Mom!, he had encouraged his actors to depart from the script and improvise, which restricted his ability to use the camera to develop mood and atmosphere. Sisters would be the first but not the last time he wed the subtleties of exposition with the eloquence of camera movement, both enhanced by an orchestral score.

A story of dualities—clashes within as well as between characters—Sisters is about once-conjoined twins, a startling murder, and the journalist who witnesses the crime from her apartment across the courtyard and sets out to find the killer. In movie shorthand, Sisters paraphrases elements of Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho. Yet its searching camera work—often doubled in split screens suggesting both split personalities and clashing perspectives—is uniquely De Palma’s. While Sisters is not his first overt nod to Hitchcock—that was Murder à la Mod (1968)—it is the best, and most mordantly funny, in a career that also includes the glosses Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980).

When I first saw Sisters in 1973, I didn’t catch its sly references to Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo. That’s because I had never seen those movies. They were among the Hitchcock films withdrawn from circulation in the sixties and unavailable until 1983, when Universal acquired their distribution rights. Thus I originally credited to De Palma narrative twists he had appropriated and made his own. Back in the day, when I didn’t know a tracking shot from a polio shot or Bernard Herrmann from Edward Herrmann, neither the film’s tension-ratcheting camera work nor its hair-raising score by the composer of Vertigo registered. What unnerved me were the conflicts experienced by Sisters’ main characters. Movies about female twins (or any pairs of women) often frame the either/or polarities of women’s experiences, as film historian Jeanine Basinger has observed. Typically, the central duality (money versus love, career versus family, etc.) represents a dilemma the heroine resolves in order to achieve happiness or wholeness. Spoiler alert: nobody, female or male, gets out of Sisters whole.

While Grace finds no evidence of murder when she accompanies the policemen to Danielle’s apartment, she finds some clues that make her suspect Dominique of murder and Danielle of a cover-up. At the apartment, she also meets Emil, who has an unexplained contusion on his forehead. Might it be a residual trace of surgical separation from his own Siamese twin?

To learn more, Grace hires a private detective (Charles Durning) to search Danielle’s flat and to follow an article of furniture moved out of the apartment. She also contacts a fellow journalist, the author of a magazine article about the twins. He shows her a documentary about them, and she recognizes Emil as the surgeon who sundered them. In the footage, another doctor advances the idea that each twin is the other’s psychic complement. In other words, each is incomplete, and together they add up to one whole woman. Which is the physiological counterpart of a split screen in which each side tells part of the whole story. (By the way, the documentary is credited to film critic and future screenwriter Jay Cocks.)

When the documentary ends, the journalist tells Grace that Dominique died shortly after the surgery.

The most thrilling passage of De Palma’s psycho-thriller is the second reveal, which offers visual exposition and a soupçon of the verbal kind, taking the viewer deeper into the why. Grace tails Danielle and Emil to an institution that’s a halfway house between asylum and sanatorium. There, Emil advises a colleague that Grace is a new patient. Before she can prove she is not, she is sedated and placed on a gurney, where Emil administers hypnotherapy to make her forget the murder she witnessed. When he places Grace’s hand on Danielle’s surgical scar, the camera closes in on the iris of Grace’s eye, and she seems to channel Dominique.

In a hallucinatory sequence that divulges more of the twins’ backstory and is peopled by the figures and filled with the objects of Grace’s past day, she “becomes” Dominique. She sees the reverse angle of the documentary that the journalist showed her, and she sees how the “documentary” conveniently framed out critical details of the twins’ experiences growing up in an institution that resembles a casting call for Tod Browning’s Freaks.

In a second psychic flashback, Grace/Dominique experiences the emotional discomfort of witnessing Emil make love to her sister. In a third, Grace/Dominique is in a surgical theater, watched by many sets of twins as Emil prepares to separate the sisters. The image of surgery as spectacle resembles a grotesque version of Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic.

As I write this, I remember that that celebrated painting once hung in the lobby of Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where De Palma’s father was the longtime head of orthopedic surgery. And while De Palma has credited a Life magazine image of conjoined twins as the provenance of his narrative, to what extent did Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, home of the famous death casts of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, perhaps inspire this material as well?

As Grace internalizes Dominique’s emotional experiences, she learns that, like Norman Bates in Psycho, Danielle has physically internalized her late relative. All the result of a mad doctor’s abuse of power disguised as healing “sick” (read: not submissive) women.

In both form and content, Sisters intends to agitate the brain and the peripheral nervous system. Rewatching it as a mature moviegoer, I see its body-horror connections to the work of David Cronenberg, like Rabid (1977), likewise about a woman messed with by doctors, and its status as a precursor to the psychological surrealism of David Lynch, especially Mulholland Dr. (2001), where two women experience an emotional and spiritual transference.

One key theme of Sisters, pointedly captured in its coda as a detective perched on a telephone pole peers through binoculars at a cow and a couch, is that we can look, peek, spy, and watch, but looking is not synonymous with truly seeing, as in understanding. Looking reveals only the what, not the why. That’s not Hitchcockian—it’s De Palmian.

Sisters: Psycho-Thriller, Qu’est-ce Que C’est?

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