Sisters of the Plague

It seems to me that most WLW are either sleazy or boring. In fact, there’s some that are even both. Finding a genuinely good sapphic horror movie is rare. Though admittedly, that’s because I plumb the depths of lesbian cinema more so than I do cinema overall. Still, though. I do think that we’re coming to the end of the era of using lesbian content for lazy sleaze. It’s not surprising or shocking enough anymore. So instead, it’s more likely that any newish WLW horror movie I watch will be boring. This is all a long way of saying that Sisters of the Plague is dead boring.

Sisters of the Plague spends roughly the first half of the film establishing the lead character’s life as it is “normally”. Before the spooky stuff. Protagonist Jo has a girlfriend named Kate and a normal, boring life. The only thing is, she’s having strange dreams. These dreams become more and more distracting to her to the point where Jo decides she should seek psychic assistance. If anything, this seems to escalate the situation. There’s a whole evil spirit deal that relates to the death of Jo’s mother. Frankly, because the first half of this movie is Jo being normal, by the time the spooky plot elements became prominent, I’d already stopped caring.

That last sentence basically sums up my whole issue with the movie. This thing is boring as hell for way longer than it should be. The first half of this is seriously tedious. There’s minimal setup of spooky things to come, and also, none of the other elements work either. The dialogue is bad. The acting is bad. The camerawork is bad. This is yet another movie where I complain about the atmosphere or lack thereof in a horror movie. There’s not atmosphere here! No sense of lurking dread or horror to come. It’s just a boring woman shot on a handheld camera talking to her boring acquaintances.

The horror elements in the second half don’t remotely rescue the film. The second half is better, because things happen. But it’s still not very strong. The psychic element feels really muddled. Jo goes to a woman who reads tarot cards. This woman then sends her to some sort of indigenous ceremony. At said ceremony, some random hipster friend of hers is there in clown makeup. Why? I don’t know. I don’t care either. Lead actress Josephine Decker gives a good physical performance in this half. A lot of the horror relies on her physicality. But the film relies on that aspect so hard, they don’t offer her any help. Decker’s body movements are impressive, but without makeup or lighting or goddamn atmosphere, it’s not really scary. It’s just watching one person be good at their job while every other element drops the ball.

On top of everything else, the ending of Sisters of the Plague is comically abrupt. Maybe this isn’t even a movie and is in fact, the longest ever entry for the Reddit community, Perfectly Cut Screams. There’s no resolution here. But again, I can’t even drum up enough emotion to care. This movie burnt me out so much in the first half that I straight-up lost the ability to give a shit for like, 72 hours afterwards. Don’t watch Sisters of the Plague. It’s like an even cheaper, more boring version of Attachment. I wasn’t overly hyped for that one either, but it looks incredible in comparison. Really, when it comes to lower budget WLW indie horror, The Invisible Mother is still just making everyone else look bad. That movie is so good. Go watch that instead.

Overall rating: 2.7/10

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