Caryn Waechter's The Sisterhood of Night isn't, as the title suggests, the modern-day version of The Craft, although it would make a swell double feature with A Girl Like Her. When high school student Mary (Georgie Henley) decides to go offline, forsaking all manner of social media and digital communication, she persuades her friends Lavinia (Oliva DeJonge) and Catherine (Willa Cuthrell) to join in the titular Sisterhood. Meanwhile, Emily (Kara Hayward) wants to join the Sisterhood while also getting more followers for her blog. Mary declines to invite her, so Emily starts writing horrible things about them, whipping the town (and the internet) into a panic over the lesbianic and/or satanic things the Sisterhood may be doing at night in the woods, but probably totally are. (To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke overestimating America's simultaneous fascination with, and fear of, teenage girls.) The Sisterhood of Night actually holds enough interesting ideas for several movies, but they aren't always well served by Waechter's flashy, hyperkinetic style. In that respect, her picture resembles Oliver Stone's 1994 Natural Born Killers, as each is a metatextual commentary on media overload and the public's gullibility. Considering that Stone's film was set in a pre Internet, largely analog world, it goes to show that technology may change, but people don't.
Tags: Film
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