September & July

F Watchlist

The film begins as follows: sisters September and July pose in old-fashioned dresses and with white-painted faces for their mother Sheila, who is taking photographs, when she suddenly asks her teenage daughters if they would like to be smeared with blood. The initial suspicion – don't the two remind you of the twins from The Shining? – is confirmed at that moment. And the premonition that this is a peculiar family and an equally peculiar film is confirmed at every turn. The sisters are not twins, but they are symbiotically dependent on each other: July is rather shy and submissive, September dominant and imperious with a penchant for bloodlust. They are both bullied at school until September fights back so violently that their already overwhelmed and equally dysfunctional mother flees with her daughters to rural Ireland, where the family owns a small house. The directorial debut of French actress Ariane Labed, who lives in Greece, is a mixture of family melodrama, psychological character study, thriller and grotesque, and thus undoubtedly belongs to the ‘Greek weird wave’ as it is known in the Anglo-Saxon world, whose most famous representative is Labed's husband Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Poor Things). The film treads water dramaturgically for some time and draws its tension more from strange episodes that leave us feeling uneasy and astonished. It is only towards the end that some surprising character developments occur. Whether you like September & July or not, the film is certainly extraordinary, thanks in part to Balthazar Lab's camera work. What's more, despite references to male-dominated film history, it is rare to see a film with such a distinctly female perspective, perhaps only in Jane Campion or Céline Sciamma's (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu).