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In September Says, home is where the horror is. Although the film is set in present-day England and Ireland, it's a good old-fashioned Gothic fairytale at its core that pays homage to The Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson in more ways than one.
Based on the novel Sisters by Daisy Johnson, the movie is the directorial debut of Ariane Labed. She's best known for her work as an actor, appearing in her husband Yorgos Lanthimos' movies The Lobster and Alps, along with titles like Assassin's Creed, alongside Michael Fassbender, and Mary Magdalene, opposite Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix.
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September Says follows July (Mia Tharia) and September (Pascale Kann), two teenage sisters living an insular, co-dependent life under the less-than-watchful eye of their mother Sheela (Sex Education's Rakhee Thakrar). July is meek and obedient while September is domineering and often cruel: the title refers to a game the two often play, riffing on 'Simon Says', where September makes increasingly bizarre or dangerous demands of July for her own entertainment, prefaced with 'September says…'. She pushes her sister to the limits of her devotion to see if she'll snap, but she never does. When September is suspended from school for cutting off another girl's hair, however, July begins to experience something resembling independence for the first time – and isn't so willing to rescind it once her sister is back in the classroom.
A family affair
The camera keeps the audience at a distance from July and September throughout the film. Indoor overhead shots position the viewer higher than the ceiling should allow us to be, which disorientates us from the get-go, and scenes are punctuated by unsettling isolated images that feel in the vein of Lanthimos' earlier Greek-language work like Dogtooth: September unwillingly being fitted for a dress with her mother's pin cushion in her mouth, or a spillage of milk at July's bare feet on the kitchen floor. All of this hammers home a singular point, that only the sisters truly know each other and we're as excluded from their inner world as their classmates and their mother.
Sheela doesn't really know what to do with her daughters, despite seemingly raising them alone. "Where did you learn to be like that?" she asks them, despairingly, at one point. September Says is concerned with how claustrophobic your own family can feel: how can you become your own person if you can't escape where you came from? Except, instead of using the usual parent-child relationship to explore this, the film lasers in on a dysfunctional sibling relationship, taking the intensity of a co-dependent relationship between teenage girls to the next level by bringing a familial bond into the mix.
The film is split into two halves, bisected by a terrible accident the details of which remain a mystery until the movie's climax, and this chronological line in the sand also represents a blurring between dream (or nightmare) for its characters. "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream," July's English teacher reads aloud to her class early on in the film, which is the opening line of The Haunting of Hill House. July and September live in their own universe and disengaging from reality becomes a survival mechanism for the characters in September Says. But when the line between fantasy and real-life sharpens into clarity, it becomes apparent that it's a universe set to self-destruct.
September Says is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
