Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Ariane Labed’s September Says treads a thin line between the mysterious and the murky, and finally tumbles over to the wrong side. Based on Daisy Johnson’s 2020 novel Sisters, the film is about siblings July (Mia Tharia) and September (Pascale Kann), daughters of bohemian, distracted photographer Sheela (Sex Education regular Rakhee Thakrar). The girls are outsiders at school, standing out with their matching blue raincoats and general air of otherness. They have their own conspiratorial folie à deux: September protects the younger July, but also dominates her, issuing sometimes cruel commands, ritually beginning: “September says . . . ”After a dramatic incident at school — Labed doesn’t let us catch our breath to register exactly what it is — we see the family move into a seaside house in Ireland. The girls connect with some local teenagers and Sheela picks up a man in the pub; here the film veers away from the girls to follow Sheela, even giving us her thoughts in voiceover. This odd shift of focus and break in the film’s continuity come across more like impromptu choices than part of a coherent narrative strategy. There is also a bizarre hallucination at the kitchen sink — fun, but jarringly incongruous — while the surprise ending feels unearned, not to say something of a cheat.This is the first feature by French actor Labed, a key player in films of the so-called Greek “weird wave”; the depiction of the sisters here, often seen walking stiffly side by side, more than slightly echoes the adult friends in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, one of them played by Labed. As a portrait of dysfunctional domesticity and young female trauma, September Says never quite gels. But Tharia and Kann give vivid, unsettling performances, bringing an enthusiastic spark to a film that otherwise seems to float in its own hermetically sealed space.★★☆☆☆In cinemas now
