Review of Perfect Sisters (2014) by 28Director — 27 Jan 2016

Georgie Henley and Abigail Breslin are terrific in this film, let's start there. Henley catches the unsettling schizophrenic attributes of her character, smiling and laughing bizarrely, utterly out of sync with the awful crime they're planning, and then commit. Breslin is just as compelling, her character stricken into near catatonia by what they've done, suddenly thrown into a wrenching and terrible grief. The supporting roles are credible and well-acted, but the film founders on an element that I'm not sure has ever been, or can ever be, captured on film. That is the effect that alcoholism and incorrigible drunkenness can cause on the victims of the alcoholic - the indescribable outrage, made a hundred times worse by the impossibility of fighting it. While Mira Sorvino's character seems 'out of it' and depraved, that doesn't begin to convey the destructiveness of alcoholism, or the dreadful toll it takes.

The film itself is borderline dogme, perhaps intentionally, but it's not consistent through the film. Some scenes are beautiful and lyric, others look like a high-school production by students without the faintest idea how to shoot a scene. A flawed effort, but again, I can't say enough about Henley and Breslin - they make the film.