September Says: Ariane Labed’s inventive debut understands the creepiness of sisters

Unconditional love can turn a home into a haunted house when shared with those willing to use the promise against you. So it is for July, a shy teen who is tormented at school and controlled at home by her more confident older sister September, who keeps her close with acts of protection, delivered with whispered derisions and tugs on her plait. Born a year apart, the sisters share the kind of disturbing quasi-supernatural bond usually reserved for twin horror, something the film wryly acknowledges from the opening scene, as September and July’s mother Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar), a fine art photographer, dresses them up as the Grady girls from The Shining (1980). Sheela directs her daughters with a cool detachment as they pose – examining the sisters’ hermetic world from behind the safety of the camera lens.

Greek-French director Ariane Labed got her start in the so-called ‘Greek Weird Wave’, with breakout acting roles in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s coming-of-age oddity Attenberg (2010) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) – and her first feature as director, September Says, is intensely actor-focused. Adapted from Daisy Johnson’s 2020 modern gothic novel Sisters, it brings her rhythmic prose to life with two skilfully choreographed physical performances from its leads. As July and September, brilliant newcomers Mia Tharia and Pascale Kann speak and move almost in unison, their limbs long and awkward with the weight of growing pains.

Splitting Johnson’s novel in two, Labed structures the film around the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of an unseen school incident that implodes the lives of the sisters and their mother. The ‘before’ plays out like a genre-inflected episode of Sex Education (2019-23) in a nondescript secondary school in Oxford where bullies shoot vicious insults at July, and a class screening of a David Attenborough animal video provides a clangingly obvious reference to her sexual awakening.

But Labed jolts the audience out of any cosy teen-TV familiarity with the violent thwack of July’s head against metal as she’s pushed into a swimming pool – and the darkly funny sight of a useless teacher trying to fish out her unconscious body with a limp pool noodle. A horrible incident, sure – but not ‘the’ incident, the one that sees July, September and Sheela leave town and hole up in their granny’s cluttered cottage, known as the Settle House (the girls’ father is dead, and mentioned only through cursed words that allude to abuse).

In the biggest departure from the book, Labed shifts the Settle House from North Yorkshire to an unnamed Irish village, a move signalled mainly by the packet of Taytos served in the local pub, and a gaudy image of the Pope seen on the (you’d hope, ironically owned?) flask of the man who comes to install the internet. As Sheela withdraws from her daughters, withholding love and nurturing, the girls disappear into the detritus of the place, layering themselves in their grandmother’s clothes. Meanwhile September’s bossy, childish games with July move closer to threat – “September says eat this jar of mayonnaise,” “September says engrave my name on that window pane.”

Their relationship is charged by a domestic terror similar to that of Constance and Merricat, the reclusive sisters of Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). September wouldn’t spike the sugar bowl with arsenic – but she might convince July she had, then order her to eat it by the spoonful.

The Settle House move shrinks the girls’ world to a snow globe, its claustrophobia heightened by the atmospherically grainy 16mm and 35mm photography of Balthazar Lab (who also shot Labed’s 2019 short Olla), using minimal light as the sisters retreat further into a near-telepathic bond. One sequence of September and July drinking cans on the beach with local teens was shot using nothing but firelight. You can practically taste the cheap beer.

There’s something of the inventive scrappiness of Luna Carmoon’s Hoard (2023) in the way September Says trades exposition for grubby sensorial experiments. Like Carmoon’s leads, September and July communicate on an animalistic level – circling one another in a cacophony of growls and grunts to exorcise feelings about the ‘incident’ they don’t dare say aloud.

Labed’s film, like Johnson’s novel, understands how sisters practise life on one another, testing out the worst facets of their personalities until they are ready to present them to the world. It knows that sisters do not simply relate to each other – they inhabit one another, branches inosculated by their ability to predict a parent’s shift in mood or describe the scent of their family home. They can recount the stories behind each other’s childhood scars – because they are usually the ones who caused them.

► September Says is in UK cinemas 21 February.