A charming foray into the world of castration anxiety, Sisters is at once highly inventive and highly derivative, and after an odd start takes off in some disturbing directions. It's not the most masterfully paced movie, but it truly comes alive in its setpieces, which are handled with a great deal of visual flair.
Margot Kidder gives a serviceable performance as the mysterious model with a Dark Secret; Jennifer Salt comes across a lot better, as hers is a trickier part to play; and William Finley has a field day as Kidder's ex-husband, who is alternately disturbed and fascinated by his ex-wife's psychosis. But the true star of the movie is De Palma, nestling cozily within the confines of the genre to produce a more or less unique picture; audaciously switching to split-screen technique to increase tension (he would go back to this well again), and providing the film's reason for being in the form of a hallucinatory recreation of the traumatic separation of the titular sisters. Furthermore, as mentioned before, I've rarely ever seen a movie confronting male castration anxiety so directly; if it's all a little Freudian-in-primary-colors, it still has an impact entirely of its own.
Margot Kidder gives a serviceable performance as the mysterious model with a Dark Secret; Jennifer Salt comes across a lot better, as hers is a trickier part to play; and William Finley has a field day as Kidder's ex-husband, who is alternately disturbed and fascinated by his ex-wife's psychosis. But the true star of the movie is De Palma, nestling cozily within the confines of the genre to produce a more or less unique picture; audaciously switching to split-screen technique to increase tension (he would go back to this well again), and providing the film's reason for being in the form of a hallucinatory recreation of the traumatic separation of the titular sisters. Furthermore, as mentioned before, I've rarely ever seen a movie confronting male castration anxiety so directly; if it's all a little Freudian-in-primary-colors, it still has an impact entirely of its own.