Through Splintered Glass, Darkly: Voyeuristic Shadows, Mirror Twins, the Dance of Identity, Haunted Gazes, and Watching the Obsessive Psyche Unravel in Sisters:
As dusk falls at the drive-in, I can already feel that unique buzz—the anticipation of watching Sisters unfurl on the big outdoor screen or the big screen in my living room.
This is yet another film I’ll be delving deep into, drawn by its blend of Hitchcockian suspense and De Palma’s feverish visual style. What makes this film so darkly compelling to me is how it intertwines the voyeuristic scrutiny that runs through De Palma’s suspenseful narrative, fractured identities, and psychosexual tension and disquiet, sinking us into a relentless atmosphere where every frame teeters between paranoia and revelation.
For me, Sisters isn’t just another suspense thriller; it’s a hypnotic plunge into unsettling obsession, psychological horror, identity, and twisted sibling bonds that have gripped me since my first viewing.
“You know, there are so few people that I have any feeling for. Not just men, you know. Ever since my sister left. We have had such a close bond.” – Danielle Breton
What keeps me coming back is how De Palma masterfully turns the act of watching and psychological unraveling into a disorienting trip, making every split-screen and nervous glance feel intensely personal. Watching the fractured lives of Kidder’s character play out, I can’t help but get sucked into the relentless tension, each revelation and reversal echoing the messy, unresolved questions that make the film impossible to shake off.
Inside De Palma’s reel, obsessions bloom in shadows: A sister cleaved from a sister—one longing, one ebbing, two sisters’ souls stitched with binding that aches and cuts underneath the knife point intimacy.
Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972) is a master class in suspense, a film that wears its Hitchcockian worship with sly confidence but also pulses with De Palma’s emerging, unmistakable identity.
The surface tricks—split-screens, voyeuristic camera moves, the shrill glory of Bernard Herrmann’s score, immediately evoke the great suspense maestro, but as the narrative coils into psychological horror and social satire, Sisters becomes its own strange animal: a tale of madness, violence, and the unnerving bond of twins, shot through the psyhco- sexual ambiguity and pulpy humor.
De Palma, at this early juncture in his career, was evolving from a director of brash comedies into the architect of stylish thrillers; Sisters marks the first time he plunges totally into the genre. The film’s mood is bleak, jittery, and darkly comic; even the opening credits (with their clinical photographs of embryos and twins) set an uneasy, off-kilter tone. The influence of Hitchcock is overt, especially in the split-screen sequences, voyeuristic motifs, and the air of wrongness that permeates every frame, but De Palma’s signature emerges in the audacious visual flourishes, narrative reversals, and a willingness to let violence erupt with a startling sense of the grotesque.
The acting is anchored by Margot Kidder in a bravura performance as Danielle Breton, a French Canadian model, charming and mysterious but haunted, shimmering between vulnerability and danger. Kidder doubles as Dominique, her psychically tethered twin, capturing the duality with unnerving conviction. Jennifer Salt embodies Grace Collier, a feisty, idealistic reporter whose career aspirations and tenacity draw her into the film’s web of murder and gaslighting; Salt gives Grace both grit and relatability. William Finley is profoundly creepy as Emil Breton, Danielle’s ex-husband and the story’s ambiguous puppet-master, at once menacing and pathetic. Charles Durning’s private investigator, Larch, supplies a bit of world-weary comic relief. The casting, so precisely etched, serves to ground the film’s often feverish style.
Cinematographer Gregory Sandor crafts Sisters with a raw Big Apple grit—shot in New York and Staten Island, the milieu transmits the shabbiness and chaos of early-1970s urban life. The film’s visual inventiveness is relentless: De Palma utilizes split-screens to heighten tension (showing, for example, the cleanup of a crime on one side while police, on the other, bumble through their investigation), and executes long, fluid tracking shots that both echo Hitchcock’s Rope and push the viewer into the maze of deception. Herrmann’s score is its own character, shrieking and brooding with similar aesthetic precision and nuance, a worthy descendant of his work on Psycho and Vertigo.
Psycho-sexual implications slither through every narrative turn. The film is less interested in Freudian diagnoses than in the spectacle of desire and repression splitting along gendered, bodily, and psychic lines. The conjoined twins’ forced separation, Danielle’s oscillation between sexual activity and trauma, Emil’s proprietary control, and Grace’s struggles as a woman in a man’s world all entwine in a dizzying exploration of identity, repression, and violence.
The murder scenes themselves derive a queasy charge from their positioning: groin-stabbings literalize castration anxiety, while the entangled twins interrogate the boundaries of self, sexuality, and madness. Voyeurism is everywhere, from the opening game show (involving hidden cameras and pranks) to Grace’s obsessive surveillance, and even the audience itself is implicated as a spectator of questionable morality.
The plot is a delicious labyrinth, moving with icy precision from set-piece to set-piece. It begins with advertising exec Philip Woode (Lisle Wilson) winning a meal for two on a hidden camera show, where he meets Danielle, the alluring French Canadian model.
“I don’t know what to do, so I just stand there and, uh, I feel very stupid and about, uh, then I said to the photographer—I said something so terrible you can’t even put it in the French movie. But, he deserved that, you know. He’s a—how you say that word? He’s a—he’s a son of a bastard.”?— Danielle Breton
“Son of a bitch.”— Phillip Woode
“Yes, he was that too. Son of a bitch. But I’m not, you know—I’m not like you Americans’ women’s liberation. I don’t, uh, I don’t spend my life to hate the men. I don’t like that. But this man, he have deserve what I tell him.”— Danielle Breton
After dinner, Danielle, nervy and radiant, invites Philip back to her Staten Island apartment; her ex-husband Emil’s jealous intrusion outside is managed by trickery, and Philip and Danielle sleep together. In the morning, Danielle, disturbed and agitated, tells Philip it’s her birthday and that her twin, Dominique, has arrived. Philip runs errands for her: getting her medication (her supply of mysterious red pills is dwindling) and a birthday cake. Meanwhile, ominous hints of Dominique’s bitterness flare up during Danielle’s phone calls to Emil.
Upon Philip’s return, he is savagely stabbed by Dominique, it seems, in a fit of psychotic rage. His desperate attempt to scrawl “help” in his own blood on the window is witnessed by Grace, the tenacious journalist who lives across the courtyard. Grace phones the police; Emil arrives and, with grotesque calm, helps Danielle hide the body in the sofa bed before the authorities arrive. Grace, frustrated by the police’s dismissiveness and coded racism, vows to investigate the murder herself, convinced Danielle is guilty.
“I saw a murder, and I’m going to prove it.” Grace Collier
Grace’s personal investigation quickens: she hires Larch, a private detective, and uncovers a medical file on the Blanchion Twins, conjoined twin girls separated only recently. Dominique, she learns, supposedly died in the operation. Grace trails Danielle and Emil to a bleak mental hospital, running into a sequence of surreal, increasingly nightmarish complications.
At the hospital, Emil manipulates the staff into believing Grace is a delusional new patient named Margaret; she is sedated and left vulnerable. He then drugs Grace and Danielle, plunging Grace into a black-and-white dream-like hallucinatory state. Under Emil’s influence and drugs, she relives elements of Danielle and Dominique’s traumatic past, in which she dreams herself into the role of Dominique, haunted by memories of meshed identity, psychic invasion, and sexual betrayal.
The truth, as revealed in this fever dream, is bleak: Danielle and Dominique, orphaned and conjoined, were separated by Emil, but not before Dominique, jealous, marginalized, and traumatized, lashed out violently, stabbing Danielle in the stomach when Danielle became pregnant by Emil.
The trauma left Danielle barren; Dominique died in the surgery, but lives on as a split personality that emerges at moments of sexual intimacy and stress, producing catastrophic violence.
As tension peaks, Emil attempts to summon “Dominique” from Danielle through sexual manipulation, but is himself murdered, slashed to death in a grisly inversion of the earlier crime’s violence. Emil subjects Grace to hypnotic suggestion, feeding her a false narrative and having her repeat that there was never a murder in Danielle’s apartment.
Grace ultimately awakens, still under the effects of this hypnosis, witnessing Danielle mourning over Emil’s dead body. Danielle/Dominique kills Emil after he pushes her to split into her violent “Dominique” persona.
When questioned by Detective Kelly, Grace, still under Emil’s hypnotic programming, robotically recites the false story that Emil implanted, denying there was ever a murder or that she witnessed anything important.
She is left confused and silenced, unable to tell her story or expose the truth. Grace, drugged and powerless, is left babbling Emil’s scripted denials to police, effectively silenced, robbed of agency, her story discounted, and her memory broken.
Meanwhile, the investigation trails off with Larch following the sofa-bed (with Philip’s body hidden inside) to a rural train station, a bleak final punchline emblematic of the film’s bitter humor and skepticism about authority and truth.
Sisters ends on a note of dark ambiguity worthy of its Hitchcockian heritage. The monstrous, split self remains unpunished; the moral order is not restored; and the final shots leave us awash in doubt, perverse empathy, and suspicion of everything that calls itself “normal.” De Palma’s film is as much a meditation on the impossibility of knowing the other as it is a stylish shocker — a dazzling, disturbing portrait of violence, madness, and the mutilated ties that bind.
