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There’s a lot to grab your attention here, but strong performances struggle to save Ariane Labed’s adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel SistersAward-winning French star Ariane Labed directs her first feature film, a self-aware and self-conscious work she has adapted from the novel Sisters by Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson. Johnson’s own debts to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are acknowledged in the film with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”, and a visual quote from The Shining. It’s made in a style clearly influenced by the Greek new wave in which Labed made her name in films such as Attenberg and Alps.There’s an awful lot to grab the attention here: a story of an intense sisterly bond in a private shared world, a lot of set-pieces, big performances, dysfunctional violence and a hallucination involving lemurs. And yet I felt it didn’t really come together; this is an international coproduction in which something is lost in translation. The action takes place in Oxford and Yorkshire in the book; in the film it apparently starts somewhere in the UK as there is a preponderance of English accents (certainly among the main characters) although one scene is evidently set in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Then the action moves to rural Ireland with Irish accents. Continue reading...