There are horror remakes, and then there’s Sisters (2006)—a film so unnecessary it feels like cinematic malpractice. Directed by Douglas Buck and starring Stephen Rea, Lou Doillon, and Chloë Sevigny, this ill-advised reboot of Brian De Palma’s 1972 cult classic manages to take a sleek, stylish psycho-thriller and remake it into something resembling a Lifetime movie that accidentally swallowed a medical textbook. If De Palma’s Sisters was an exercise in voyeurism, split identity, and razor-edged suspense, Buck’s version is more like watching grad students improvise a psychodrama in a rental classroom with a fake corpse and half a script.
Let’s put on our latex gloves and dissect this thing.
The Setup Nobody Cares About
The story begins with developmental psychologist Dr. Philip Lacan (Stephen Rea), who moonlights as a children’s party magician. Yes, you read that correctly. Because nothing screams “psychological horror” quite like watching a solemn Irish actor pull rabbits out of hats while looking like he wants to kill his agent. He’s joined by his ex-wife Angelique (Lou Doillon), who acts as his magician’s assistant. Somewhere in this swirl of latex gloves, psychological jargon, and awkward ex-lover banter is Grace (Chloë Sevigny), a journalist investigating malpractice at Lacan’s Zurvan Institute.
The early scenes should build tension; instead, they play out like a confused community theater production of Law & Order: Psychology Unit. Grace is spotted snooping, gets tossed out, and for reasons that only exist to keep the plot crawling forward, decides to stalk Lacan’s patients anyway.
The Birthday Surprise Nobody Wanted
Angelique, who lives with her mysterious “twin sister” Annabel, takes home Dylan (Dallas Roberts), a man so bland he looks like he was designed by a committee to be both attractive and forgettable. After a one-night stand, Dylan’s reward is to be murdered by knitting needles in one of the least frightening murder scenes ever filmed. Imagine being stabbed while the killer looks like she’s deciding what to have for lunch. That’s about the energy here.
Chloë Sevigny’s Grace witnesses the murder remotely via Philip’s conveniently hacked security system—a plot device that feels more like a late-night script patch than narrative ingenuity. She calls the police, barges in, and then the movie really starts to unravel: evidence disappears, corpses are hidden behind television sets (yes, that actually happens), and Grace doubles down on her obsessive snooping.
Psychology 101, With Knives
From here, the film turns into a jargon-soaked swamp of therapy tapes, track marks, and hallucinatory flashbacks that want to be clever but feel like watching a stoner explain Freud after two beers. Grace discovers a cassette recording of Angelique’s mother describing the twins’ birth and creepy circus act days, because apparently this movie thinks exposition by tape recorder is edgy.
Meanwhile, Philip’s sinister obsession with Angelique and Annabel starts to come into focus, though “focus” is too generous a word. The original Sisters blurred the line between psychology and horror with Hitchcockian flair; this remake bludgeons you with on-the-nose dialogue and heavy-handed “twist” foreshadowing.
The “Twist” That’s About As Surprising As A Rerun
By the final act, we learn what anyone paying attention guessed an hour earlier: Annabel is dead, Angelique is carrying her “spirit” like an unwanted house guest, and Philip is basically a horny mad scientist who wanted both to separate the twins and sleep with one of them. It’s a Freudian casserole, reheated badly.
Grace ends up sedated at the institute, where she hallucinates a mash-up of Annabel’s psychosis and Philip’s sleaze. Things spiral into a murky mess of stabbing, mistaken identity, and surgical scars. The final “shocker” is Grace essentially adopting Annabel’s persona, walking out of the asylum with Angelique like they’ve just finished a yoga retreat instead of a blood-soaked breakdown.
The original film’s commentary on voyeurism, identity, and trauma? Gone. What’s left is a half-baked potluck of clichés: syringes, hallucinations, scalpel scars, and Stephen Rea looking like he regrets not doing a TV procedural instead.
Performances: The Good, the Bad, and the Sleepy
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Stephen Rea looks like he’s paying off a mortgage. His performance is so low-energy it borders on narcoleptic. Watching him menace women feels less like horror and more like waiting for him to finish a crossword.
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Lou Doillon has screen presence but is saddled with dialogue that sounds like it was written during a NyQuil binge. Her Angelique/Annabel duality is supposed to be unnerving, but mostly it plays like a drama student trying out accents.
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Chloë Sevigny is the only one who seems remotely invested, but her character Grace is written as such a nosy, humorless drag that you almost root for her to get locked in a broom closet for the rest of the film.
Horror Without the Horror
The cardinal sin here is that Sisters isn’t scary. Not once. The murders are flat, the atmosphere is limp, and the hallucination sequences are so artless they might as well come with a “filmmaker thought this would be trippy” disclaimer. The use of Vancouver as a stand-in for everywhere doesn’t help—the film has no sense of place, no grit, no texture. It’s just beige apartments, beige hospitals, beige nightmares.
By the time the scalpel came out for the “scar-sharing” scene, I wasn’t horrified—I was laughing. If the intent was to disturb, it failed; if the intent was to make me wonder if anyone proofread the script, then congratulations.
Final Thoughts: A Remake Nobody Needed
Brian De Palma’s 1972 Sisters wasn’t perfect, but it had style, sleaze, and genuine tension. This 2006 remake has none of that. It’s a joyless, plodding mess that mistakes medical jargon and overwrought hallucinations for horror.
Watching it feels less like a movie and more like a punishment: 90 minutes in a padded cell, listening to a psych professor drone about “parasitic personalities” while Stephen Rea stares at you like he’s thinking about lunch.
Final Verdict: Sisters (2006) is less a remake than a rehash, a film that takes the bones of De Palma’s original and strips them of blood, style, and soul. It’s horror declawed, identity theft without the thrill, and psychological horror without the psychology.
Rating: 2 out of 10 knitting needles, mostly for Chloë Sevigny’s effort and the fact that at least it ends.
