September Says

September Says

IFFR 2025

VERDICT: A pair of troubled teenage sisters share a spookily close bond in actor turned director Ariane Labed's patchy but atmospheric feature debut.

Teenage sex and violence, the crazed hormonal chaos of puberty, and dysfunctional family dynamics make for a potent cocktail in September Says, the debut feature by Greek-French actor-director Ariane Labed. Feted for her roles in Attenburg (2010), The Lobster (2015, The Souvenir (2018), The Brutalist (2024) and more, Labed’s adaptation of British author Daisy Johnson’s gothic-tinged 2020 novel Sisters is an alluringly offbeat thriller with a strong female focus, both on and off screen. But it is also a patchy package overall, lacking the narrative heft and emotional force it needs to transcend minor horror-adjacent indie curio status.

Labed also happens to be married to feted Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness), and seems comfortable deploying a similar blend of macabre tragicomic absurdism here, even though some critics have inevitably drawn unflattering comparisons. Gathering mixed reviews since Cannes, September Says rounds off its long festival run with its Dutch premiere in Rotterdam this week, ahead of theatrical release across much of Europe in February and March.

Teenage sisters September (Mia Tharia) and July (Pascal Kann) share a modest apartment in an unnamed Irish city with their eccentric, depressive, free-spirited photographer mother Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar). Misfits at school, where their bohemian background and mixed heritage make them easy targets for racist bullies, the girls share an intensely close bond that appears almost telepathic at times, ritually mirroring each other’s movements, communicating through secret jokes and animalistic grunts. Older and more confident, September is both fiercely protective and domineering towards July, ominously asking her “if I die would you die too?” For her part, July is quietly manipulative of September, relishing the attention that comes with their intimate love-hate connection.

After this promising set-up, with its faint echoes The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Let The Right One In (2008), the narrative shifts gear. Following a violent confrontation, which Labed only shoots in deliberately cryptic terms, this emotionally wounded family trio flee the city for a remote holiday house on the coast. Any more plot detail risks getting into spoilers, but September Says turns increasingly disturbing and paranormal in its final act, when the sisters become unreliable narrators locked in self-destructive, psycho-sexual power games.

Judged by regular dramatic thriller rules, September Says feels disappointingly flat. Shrugging off the “genre” label in interviews, Labed seems more interested in creating disconnected vignettes of mannered oddness than a consistently engaging dramatic arc. Her style is clearly indebted to the darkly deadpan style pioneered by her writer-director husband and his fellow “Greek Weird Wave” peers, which is totally valid, but this detached approach feels ill-suited to the suspense-driven folk-horror plot of Johnson’s novel.

That said, there is still plenty to savour about Labed’s ambitiously quirky debut. Tharia and Kann both exude raw charm in their big screen debuts. An overt visual homage to the blood-splattered ghostly twins in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), borrowed directly from Johnson’s novel, is both amusing and eerie. A sex scene between Sheela and a random stranger she picks up in a local bar is another inspired comic highlight, her inner monologue commenting on the action as it happens, judging her lover’s patchy performance in real time. As one of French cinema’s more vocal feminist campaigners, Labed’s work promoting intimacy co-ordination on film sets may be an asset here as she foreground realistic female pleasure over cliched male fantasy.

Handsomely shot on a mix of 16mm and 35mm by Balthazar Lab, September Says has an appealingly timeless look, sprinkled with hallucinatory interludes and occasional ruptures in the fabric of reality. Dates and locations are never clearly specified, though the accents and coastal locations obviously root the story in Ireland rather than the rural North Yorkshire of Johnson’s novel. Spooked, jarring sound design by Johnnie Burn, who won a BAFTA for his work on The Zone of Interest (2023), helps amplify the steady background hum of uncanny otherness. This is a flawed debut overall, but stylish and intriguing enough to leave you hoping Labed will do more directing.

Director, screenwriter: Ariane Labed, from the book Sisters by Daisy Johnson
Cast: Mia Tharia, Pascale Kann, Rhakee Thakrar
Cinematography: Balthazar Lab
Editing: Bettina Böhler
Production design: Lauren Kelly
Music: Juliet Martin
Sound design: Johnnie Burn
Producers: Ed Guiney, Lara Hickey, Chelsea Morgan Hoffman, Andrew Lowe
Production companies: Sackville Film and TV (Ireland), Crybaby Films (UK), Match Factory Productions GmbH (Germany)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Harbour)
In English
100 minutes