Jo (Josephine Decker) sustains herself in New Orleans by reciting ghost stories for a living. She conducts ghost walks and participates in performance art pieces called “Haunted Gatherings” in allegedly haunted places. Jo has a strong instinctive connection with spirits, a trait she inherited from her mother who was a psychic. It seems a certain spirit is after her, causing a series of nightmares and hallucinatory visions. This propels Jo to uncover the truth about her mother’s death.
While all this is happening, Jo is looking after her alcoholic father (Thomas Francis Murphy) who spends his sober moments bleeding from his throat, cursing, and drinking beer. Given that a missing father figure deprived Jo of love and care throughout her life, she is now looking forward to spending time with him, even if he is an angry drunk who violently descends into alcoholism. Behind the mask of eagerly attempting to build a relationship, Jo also has reason to believe her father is trying to hide details about her mother’s death and wants direct answers.
In the absence of Jo, her girlfriend Kate (Isolde Chae-Lawrence) is burdened with the responsibility of taking care of her father. Jo treats this as a perfect chance for Kate and her father to bond while she is away. Unfortunately, Kate would rather prefer not to be around a dying man. Like everybody may have assumed, the fact that Jo’s father is living with them puts an enormous weight on their already shaky relationship.
Jorge Torres-Torres’s feature-length debut, Sisters of the Plague, is an understated ghost story that came out in 2015 at Out fest. The film does not rely on special effects for its storytelling. Rather, Torres-Torres draws on the reality defying performances of the cast, as well as the French Quarter’s naturally haunting atmosphere, in order to highlight the film’s conflicts. The actors’ performances are accomplishing raw, entirely avoiding the Hollywood stereotypes we know so well. As the potentially possessed psychic, Josephine Decker gives such a hysterical performance that feels unforced and unnatural; she’s far too scared to mock the situation, but she exceeds the boundaries of parody. Jo’s visions are intense, and Decker’s facial expressions fully embody that. She gets her head gasping for air, but other than that, Decker does not need to speak her fear. Thomas Francis Murphy sheds the Hollywood depiction of drunkenness and instead embodies an ex drunken grump. While he plays a character who’s rough around the edges, a twinkle in Murphy’s eyes adds a touch of charm.
More importantly, every sentence that is spoken by Murphy is as believable as the blood that is spewed from his lungs. Every word that Murphy speaks is equally convincing.
The most astounding thing in Sisters of the Plague is the Ashley Connor’s breathtakingly accurate camera work. The camera of Connor is never still; it floats about the subjects of the film like an agitated spirit. Connor constantly stays close to the actors in the film, employing gliding and sweeping motions to contour their bodies and limbs while predicting or echoing their movements. This approach adds a different dimension of sensuality to her work Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Funny Bunny in which Connor is controlled. Rather, the camera portray emotions as though it is a character in the film.
Jo and Kate’s relationship plays a geographical role in the way the story progresses. With a female partner, Jo seems to have more autonomy. Traditionally, horror is a masculine domain, but Sisters of the Plague is a breath of fresh air with its lack of males (even the ghost is female). Both Jo and Kate get to be women, and apart from some rather pathetic attempts to incessantly guilt trip Jo, Kate does not seek to control Jo’s behavior. One can assume that a male partner would have been more involved to Jo’s story. Not that they lack agency, but Jo and Kate do seem aggressive in their instincts and feelings which brings this interesting fluidity instantly to the narrative. Some might argue that this less controlled, feminine sense of storytelling is what makes Sisters of the Plague one of the most unique horror films in contemporary history.
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