Sissy (2022): Self-Care, Best Friends, and One Extremely Aggressive Healing Crystal

Some people process childhood trauma through therapy.

Some reconnect with old friends.

Some build a social-media brand around affirmations, invisible boundaries, and the importance of loving yourself.

Cecilia does all three, if we use the word “therapy” very loosely and ignore the rapidly growing body count.

Sissy begins as a pastel wellness satire and slowly turns into something much bloodier: a story about bullying, nostalgia, influencer culture, and what happens when “protect your peace” becomes less of a mantra and more of a homicide policy.

Sincerely, Cecilia

As children, Cecilia and Emma are inseparable. They make videos together, sing together, bury a time capsule, and promise they will grow old side by side. Emma even declares that Cecilia is the only person she wants to poop her pants with in a nursing home.

That is commitment.

Years later, Cecilia is determined to leave the name “Sissy” behind, and she is very particular about the distinction.

She is also a successful wellness influencer operating under the name Sincerely Cecilia, where she teaches followers about self-esteem, personal boundaries, meditation, and the belief that everyone is special, loved, and enough.

Her techniques are occasionally questionable.

One exercise involves placing a rope on the floor to create a symbolic personal boundary and then breathing so rapidly that Talon wondered whether the goal was meditation or hyperventilation.

Cecilia also interrupts the calm to promote products, including something called an “Elon Mask,” because even inner peace apparently needs sponsorship opportunities.

Her online life looks polished. Her real one is quieter. After filming, she eats cold pizza alone while notifications continue pouring in.

Then a routine trip to buy tampons changes everything.

Cecilia hears a familiar voice in the pharmacy and spots Emma for the first time in more than a decade.

Her first instinct is to escape.

Instead, Emma sees her.

She is thrilled.

Emma hugs Cecilia, tells her she recently thought about her, discovers she has 200,000 followers, and immediately invites her to an engagement party happening that night.

Cecilia leaves the encounter visibly shaken but increasingly excited. Memories of their childhood friendship start flooding back.

Then Emma texts her.

And suddenly Cecilia is glowing.

She becomes so distracted pulling out of the parking lot that she nearly runs over a pregnant woman she already bumped into inside the store.

Talon laughed much harder at this than basic human decency probably recommends.

The Best Friend You Remember Is Not Necessarily the Best Friend You Had

At Emma’s engagement party, Cecilia meets Fran, Emma’s fiancée, and reconnects with the version of Emma she has preserved in her head for years.

Emma is drunk, affectionate, and ecstatic that Cecilia actually came.

She drags her onstage for karaoke, where they sing the same song they loved as children.

For a few minutes, it works.

Then Emma vomits directly onto Cecilia.

Friendship restored.

Later, while Emma recovers in the bathroom, she invites Cecilia to her hens weekend. Cecilia tries suggesting coffee instead, but Emma insists. She even brings up their childhood pact after seeing two older women together earlier that day.

To Cecilia, this is enormous.

Emma remembers.

Maybe the friendship mattered just as much to her.

Maybe all those years Cecilia has spent emotionally parked in childhood were leading back here.

On the way home, that fantasy gets its first crack.

Cecilia sees a photo of Emma with another woman named Alex. The caption calls them best friends forever.

Then the childhood memories sharpen.

The matching heart necklace Cecilia remembers was not hers and Emma’s.

It belonged to Emma and Alex.

Alex arrived later, claimed Emma as her best friend, and helped push Cecilia out.

That night Cecilia digs up the old time capsule she and Emma buried as children. She watches their videos, sees them in pink wigs, and decides to dye her own hair pink before the weekend away.

The result is suspiciously perfect considering she starts with dark hair and somehow emerges with soft pastel pink, a shorter cut, and what appears to be professional styling.

Whatever brand she used deserves the sponsorship.

The more important point is that Cecilia is not merely revisiting her childhood.

She is rebuilding it.

Welcome to the Hens Weekend. Alex Lives Here.

Cecilia joins Emma, Fran, Jamie, and Tracey for the drive to the weekend retreat.

The mood is cheerful until they pass what Talon and Dan both initially identify as an extremely strange-looking dead deer.

It is a kangaroo.

In their defense, the head and front legs were doing something deeply un-deer-like.

Not long afterward, they hit another kangaroo.

This one survives the impact but is suffering badly. Fran says the humane thing is to finish it off, so they drive over it.

Cecilia watches the injured animal and briefly sees young Alex lying there instead, her face torn open.

That becomes significantly less metaphorical when they reach the house.

The beautiful remote property belongs to Alex.

And Alex is not happy to see Cecilia.

The reunion is immediate ice. Alex calls her Sissy. Cecilia corrects her. Alex does it again. Cecilia corrects her again.

Then everyone settles in for dinner, where Cecilia’s career becomes the evening’s entertainment.

She explains that she is not a psychologist or licensed therapist. She sees herself as a mental-health advocate helping people find confidence and peace.

Fran is actually training to become a psychologist.

Alex enjoys this distinction immensely.

She openly questions whether Cecilia profits from other people’s pain and mocks the idea that “Sissy,” of all people, is giving mental-health advice.

The dinner finally collapses when Alex asks whether changing her name is some kind of rebranding exercise.

Cecilia retreats to the bathroom and sits inside the rope circle she teaches her followers to use.

Online, people tell her she has changed their lives.

In this house, she cannot even get through dinner.

Emma eventually joins her, comforts her, and tells her to stop punishing herself over what happened with Alex when they were children.

They were kids.

It was a long time ago.

Cecilia is a good person.

That reassurance is exactly what Cecilia wants to hear.

It is also about to age extremely badly.

Alex Has a Scar and a Point

The next day, Cecilia overhears the others talking about her near the water.

Alex, Jamie, and Tracey call her strange and make fun of the self-help persona. Emma pushes back, reminding Alex that she bullied Cecilia when they were children.

The memories filling in around that conversation show how the friendship fractured. Alex inserted herself between Emma and Cecilia, taunted Cecilia with “Sissy the Sissy,” and made sure she knew she had been excluded from Emma’s birthday party.

Talon never liked Alex. She found her bullying and intimidating as a child and still aggressively unpleasant as an adult.

When the others leave, Alex confronts Cecilia alone. She takes Cecilia’s phone and records a video for her followers, telling them their inspirational mental-health advocate once tried to murder her.

Cecilia lunges for the phone.

They fight.

Alex manages to start uploading the video.

Cecilia grabs the huge crystal that had been given to Emma and Fran as an engagement present and smashes it into Alex’s head.

At the exact moment the present turns violent, the movie finally shows us what happened years ago.

Young Cecilia snapped under Alex’s taunting and drove the gardening trowel from the time-capsule dig straight into Alex’s face.

That is where the scar came from.

This is also where Sissy gets interesting because Alex is both awful and absolutely entitled to be furious.

As Dan pointed out, this is not a stolen Barbie doll.

Cecilia filleted her face.

Nothing says holistic wellness quite like settling the rematch with a healing crystal.

Cecilia cancels the upload.

Then she drags Alex into the woods.

Please Respect the Environment While Hiding the Body

Believing Alex is dead, Cecilia buries her.

“Buries” may be generous.

The grave is so shallow that Cecilia seems to have placed Alex on the ground, sprinkled dirt over her, and then decorated the spot with flowers and stones like a very tasteful murder Pinterest board.

Before covering her, Cecilia takes Alex’s half of the best-friend necklace.

That matters more to her than the corpse.

The moment she puts it on, Cecilia becomes almost euphoric. She has symbolically taken back the position she believes Alex stole from her as a child.

Then she records an influencer video.

Standing near the body she has just hidden, Cecilia talks calmly about kindness, nature, and helping the environment by replanting something she uprooted while hiking.

Talon was fascinated by the fact that Cecilia’s immediate moral concern after apparently killing someone is trail erosion.

Jamie wanders into the woods, finds the beautifully decorated dirt mound, calls it pretty, and then urinates directly on it.

His urine washes away enough soil to expose Alex.

So much for the memorial landscaping.

Jamie sees the body and runs.

Cecilia catches him near a cliff and insists Alex’s death was self-defense.

Jamie asks the obvious question.

If it was self-defense, why did you bury her?

No affirmation appears to cover this.

When Tracey calls for Jamie in the distance, Cecilia shoves his crutch.

Jamie falls over the cliff, hitting ledge after ledge on the way down in a sequence Talon compared to a human Plinko chip.

At this point, whatever part of Cecilia could still call Alex’s death an accident has left the weekend.

Elsewhere, Emma is searching for Alex when she loses her footing and falls into the river. She is swept downstream, which explains why she disappears while everyone else begins looking for her.

The Humane Thing to Do

Back at the house, Cecilia presents herself to Tracey as injured and frightened.

Tracey tries to help her, even drawing a bath and bringing back the Elon Mask.

Product placement survives everything.

But when Tracey reveals that she knows what happened between Cecilia and Alex, Cecilia turns on her. She eventually shoves Tracey backward into the bathtub.

Tracey’s long hair catches in the overflow drain.

Cecilia watches while she drowns.

The suction is powerful enough to partially scalp her, which gives the bathtub the most aggressive drainage system either host has ever seen.

Meanwhile, Alex wakes up.

Cecilia’s terrible burial job has accidentally saved her life.

While Alex claws her way out of the dirt, Cecilia takes the car to look for the missing Emma and encounters Fran on the road.

Fran gets into the car and quickly realizes something is very wrong. Cecilia is speeding, spiraling, and talking about how Fran has the life with Emma that Cecilia was supposed to have.

Fran tries to keep her calm.

She also cannot get her seat belt to work.

Cecilia accelerates.

Then she slams on the brakes.

Fran goes through the windshield.

She survives the impact and begins crawling along the road.

Cecilia gets back into the car and repeats the same phrase Fran used after the kangaroo accident.

It is the humane thing to do.

Then she runs over Fran’s head.

The callback is horrifying.

It is also brutally efficient.

Alex later finds a discarded phone and manages to call the police. Her injuries prevent her from explaining what happened, but the call is traced before the phone dies.

Ten Million Followers Cannot Be Wrong

Cecilia returns to the house believing everyone except Emma is dead.

She beats herself bloody with her own phone, starts a livestream, and claims Alex has attacked her and murdered everyone.

Why call the police when you can go live?

Emma eventually finds her and initially believes the story.

Then she discovers Tracey’s body hidden under a bed.

Then she notices Alex’s necklace around Cecilia’s neck.

The math improves quickly.

When Emma tries to get away, Cecilia accidentally causes her to slip and knock herself unconscious. When she wakes, she is tied to a chair while Cecilia dyes and cuts her hair.

Cecilia is trying to recreate their childhood.

Pink hair.

Old videos.

Gold nail polish.

The friendship she decided should never have ended.

Emma escapes, burns their time capsule, and finally tells Cecilia exactly what she thinks of her.

Cecilia keeps insisting she is a good person.

Emma disagrees rather emphatically.

They fight until Emma gains the upper hand and begins beating Cecilia.

Then Alex arrives.

Her head injury has left her disoriented and barely able to see. She mistakes Emma for Cecilia and repeatedly beats Emma in the face with Jamie’s crutch.

Cecilia films it.

Then she says thank you.

Alex realizes she has killed her own best friend.

She raises the crutch toward Cecilia.

The police arrive at exactly that moment, see Alex standing over the carnage with a weapon, and shoot her.

Cecilia survives.

More importantly, Cecilia controls the story.

Later she is introduced online as the lone survivor of the “Alex Kutis Massacre.”

Her audience has exploded to ten million followers.

She tells them she survived by believing in herself and thinking about the people who depended on her.

She has even written a book: Don’t Survive, Thrive.

Naturally, there is merchandise.

The murderer has successfully converted trauma into brand growth.

That may be the bleakest joke in the entire movie.

The Verdict

Dan gives Sissy 6 cents out of 10.

He thought it was better than New Year, New You, which shares several obvious ideas with it: influencer culture, old bullying, scars, revenge, and a survivor who ultimately turns tragedy into online success.

For Dan, Sissy was decent without being especially memorable. He had actually watched it only a few months earlier and barely remembered it until individual scenes started happening again. The acting worked, the violence was surprisingly graphic, and the movie had enough going for it to be enjoyable, but it was not something he would seek out again.

Talon landed slightly higher, giving it 6 to 6.5 cents out of 10.

Her biggest reaction was that she was never completely sure who she was supposed to root for.

Cecilia is unquestionably the killer. She murders people who did not deserve it, manipulates the evidence, and happily lets Alex take the blame.

And yet Talon still found herself wanting Cecilia to beat Alex.

Alex had bullied her as a child, continued antagonizing her as an adult, and seemed determined to reclaim the same power dynamic the moment Cecilia arrived.

That does not justify the murder spree.

It does, however, make the usual horror-movie moral alignment considerably messier.

Talon liked Fran and Emma and was genuinely disappointed when they died. Jamie and Tracey felt more disposable to her. She thought the performances were strong, enjoyed the darkly funny moments, and also considered this the better version of the influencer-revenge territory explored in New Year, New You.

She would not specifically go looking for it again, but if she stumbled across it already playing, she would probably stay and finish it.

So maybe Cecilia’s affirmations worked after all.

She is loved.

She is special.

She is enough.

And according to ten million followers and the police report, she is also completely innocent.