September Says

July (Mia Tharia) is in awe of her charismatic older sister September (Pascale Kann). Despite there being less than a year between the two siblings, September is the dominant force in their lives. With their odd habits and untamed body hair, the sisters are social outcasts who spend all their time together, engaged in strange, ritualistic imagery games. After a traumatic incident at school, single mother Sheela (Rakee Thankrar) takes the girls to a remote cottage in the Irish countryside. Cut off from their old lives amidst craggy scenery, the sisters taste a new kind of independence, and adolescent growing pains begin to morph into something much stranger.

Actor turned filmmaker Ariane Labed makes a striking directorial debut with this singular adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s acclaimed gothic novel Sisters, which premiered at Cannes in 2024. Like Attenberg (2010), the film in which Labed made her acting breakthrough, September Says is an uncanny depiction of young female alienation which imagines womanhood as an endless, inexplicable performance. Here, what begins as a wry, darkly comic reflection on sisterly co-dependency expands into something altogether stranger, a haunting exploration of the tender, sometimes mutually-destructive bond between mothers and daughters.