It follows a French Canadian model's separated conjoined twin who is suspected of having committed a brutal murder witnessed by a newspaper reporter in Staten Island, New York City.
[1] Advertising salesman Philip Woode wins dinner for two at a Manhattan restaurant on a Candid Camera-style television show.
Danielle Breton, a young French Canadian model and aspiring actress who was part of the prank, flirts with him and he agrees to take her as his date.
Certain that Danielle is hiding the murderer, Grace persuades her editor to let her investigate the story on the basis that the police are ignoring her because Philip was black.
Emil promises to "tell her everything": revelations that play out in a black and white sequence where Grace (in her drugged state) hallucinates herself to be Dominique.
Grace awakens to find the sorrowful Danielle tenderly embracing Emil's bloody body and screams in horror.
Scholarly discussion of Sisters has centered largely on its prevalent theme of voyeurism as well as a perceived commentary on the women's liberation movement.
The prominent allusions to works by Alfred Hitchcock have also been noted by critics such as Bruce Kawin, who wrote in 2000: Sisters... makes intelligent reference to Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), and even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
The film ends with a shot of a detective looking through binoculars at what might be called the scene of the crime, intently but fruitlessly watching a couch that no one will ever incriminate themselves with by picking up.
[8] De Palma was inspired to write the screenplay for Sisters after reading an article in Life magazine in 1966 about the lives of the Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova: At the end of the article there was a picture of the two girls sitting on a couch and the caption said that apart from the fact that they were joined at the hip both girls were physiologically normal, but as they were getting older they were developing psychological problems.
[9]The script, which De Palma co-wrote with Louisa Rose, features structural elements inspired by Hitchcock, such as killing off a prominent character early into the film, alternating points of view, and the involvement of a third party observer in solving a crime.
[14] The extended tracking shot in Danielle's apartment following the murder of Phillip was influenced by Max Ophüls and directly references Hitchcock's Rope.
[20] Meanwhile, Variety, while stating it was "a good psychological murder melo-drama", said that "Brian De Palma's direction emphasizes exploitation values which do not fully mask script weakness.
[22] George McKinnon of The Boston Globe was less laudatory, writing: "It is difficult to determine what De Palma had in mind in this morbid horror film.
[26] Richard Brody wrote of the film in The New Yorker in 2016: De Palma weaves his own obsession with movies into the dramatic fabric of Sisters by means of a scene involving a documentary about the twins that Grace views in the offices of Life magazine; this film-within-a-film becomes embedded in her unconscious mind and threatens to warp her consciousness as well.
Though De Palma's own images can't rival Hitchcock's in shot-by-shot psychological power, the intricate multiple-perspective split-screen sequences of Sisters offer a dense and elaborate counterpoint that conjures a sense of psychological dislocation and information overload belonging to De Palma's own generation and times.
[27]In 2016, Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times ranked the film as De Palma's most underrated of the 1970s, writing that "for all its low-budget creakiness, [it] feels fully formed—from its sly opening bit of misdirection to its adroit use of split-screen to its memorably churning Bernard Herrmann score.
De Palma's choice of subject matter couldn't have been more appropriate: With this film he effectively conjoined himself to Hitchcock, announcing himself as a skillful mimic with a mischievous side all his own.