On November 24, the Russian thriller Sisters is released in cinemas.
The director and screenwriter of the project was Ivan Petukhov ("Locked Up").
The main roles in the tape were played by Nikita Efremov (“Summer”, “Patient Zero”) and Irina Starshenbaum (“Ice”, “Insomnia”), who is also the creative producer of the project.
According to the plot, Anya, a young mother, has been married to the tyrant Andrei for about five years now.
For a long time, she tries to protect the child and herself from the cruelty of her husband, but in vain - Andrei is a skilled manipulator, he knows which buttons to press to keep his wife at bay.
Anya has no one to tell about her problem: her parents died when she was a teenager, she has no friends and other relatives.
The only person trying to contact her is her ex-boyfriend.
His call becomes another reason for her husband's aggression.
Anya decides to run away with her son when Andrei leaves for work.
But the attempt turns out to be unsuccessful: the husband, as if having felt something, returns home and catches the refugees.
Now Anya is locked in an apartment without keys, documents, and her son is visiting his grandmother.
In desperation, Anya looks for a way to escape and stumbles upon an "otherworldly" community of sisters who help victims of domestic violence.
With the help of the ritual of blood and fire, the girl calls on the sisterhood for help.
However, it is one thing to wish someone dead, and another thing to know that this person really is about to die.
Anya will have to decide what she is ready for for her own safety.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to call the tape a horror film in the usual sense for everyone: there are no frightening masks, demons, ghosts in it, there are no screamers, screams and a bloody mess.
The action develops slowly, and tension and anxiety grow gradually.
At the same time, there is no direct threat in the tape - it seems to be nearby, but hidden from the viewer's eyes.
Therefore, the picture can be attributed, rather, to the so-called post-horror, which is characterized by the study of human relations and psychology.
Nevertheless, it was not completely without mysticism - the mystery of the tape is given by the legend of the sisterhood that comes to the rescue.
In the past, the community of sisters lived in the forest.
When the dark forces came to them, they chose to die so that the evil would go with them.
Despite everything, the sisterhood continued its work.
Interestingly, the sisters themselves in the film look quite ordinary - from the mystical they only have dark hands and a flame that hovers around the silhouettes.
Finding out about the existence of the community is not easy: those who really need help are helped by intermediaries of sisters from the human world - this is how Anya will find out about them.
When the main character calls the community for help, she still does not know that it is impossible to refuse their services, even if the one who called them changed his mind.
Anya is afraid of her sisters and what they can do.
However, there is one way to drive away otherworldly forces: the community will leave if it feels that a person can save himself.
But to convince the magical sisterhood of this is not at all easy.
Meanwhile, it is not clear what Anya should be more afraid of: the cruelty of her husband or a meeting with the sisters who once died and their kind of help.
The authors of the tape used interesting visual solutions: charcoal animation, which is present in many episodes of the film, as well as the screen life effect, that is, the viewer sees some actions through the screen of the hero’s phone or laptop.
The filmmakers decided not to show direct violence - instead, all the consequences of the rigidity of the hero Nikita Efremov are visible on the screen: life extinguished in the eyes of the heroine, her fear of every movement of her partner and attempts to predict his actions in advance.
In one of the scenes, when Anya is washing the dishes, Andrey comes up behind her to hug her, and the heroine freezes with a knife in her hand.
Her posture betrays fear and a terrifying expectation of what might happen.
Irina Starshenbaum convincingly showed all the emotional facets of a desperate, intimidated young mother who has been living with a tyrant for several years.
Particularly impressive was the scene in which Anya bursts into hysterical laughter, thereby making the viewer feel her pain and the hopelessness of the situation.
Nikita Efremov also convincingly showed the manipulator and the owner: his hero Andrey controls the life of his wife, checks calls and a laptop, locks him in an apartment.
The hero behaves according to the template of a tyrant - he hurts, and then, with tears in his eyes, begs him to forgive and assures that he cannot live without her.
He constantly manipulates, suggesting to the victim that she herself is to blame for everything and generally winds herself up.
Anya is afraid of losing her child, and Andrei takes advantage of this, constantly reminding her that her son can be taken away.
The film "Sisters" is much deeper than it might seem from the trailer or description, and is worth the time spent, at least because it is one of the few films that illuminates a pressing problem throughout the world convincingly and reliably, and the existence and deeds of a secret mystical community of sisters is intriguing and complement the already frightening atmosphere of the tape.