Sisters: De Palma's Split-Screen Slasher

There is a stretch in the middle of Sisters where Brian De Palma cuts his frame in half and leaves it there for minutes on end. On one side, a woman is methodically cleaning blood off a sofa and hiding a body. On the other, a journalist is bringing two sceptical policemen up in a lift to the flat where the body is. The film has told you everything already. There is no mystery left in the sequence. And it is close to unbearable, because you are being made to watch a deadline and a clean-up in parallel and there is not a thing you can do about either.

That is the moment De Palma became De Palma. He was thirty-two, he had made a run of scruffy countercultural comedies, and Sisters in 1972 is where he stopped hedging about the fact that he wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock and started demonstrating that he had worked out how the machine ran.

A game show, a scar, a window

The opening is a joke that curdles. Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder), a French-Canadian model, and Philip Woode (Lisle Wilson) meet on a television programme called Peeping Toms, a hidden-camera game show in which contestants guess how a stranger will behave when they think they are unobserved. De Palma opens his film about voyeurism with a game show about voyeurism, and it is exactly as arch as it sounds and completely earned, because he then spends the rest of the picture punishing everybody who watches.

They go on a date. Philip stays the night at her flat on Staten Island. Danielle’s ex-husband Emil (William Finley) is lurking about, unwelcome and unshakeable. Danielle has a long scar down her side and takes pills she does not explain. And in the morning, the next-door building’s windows deliver De Palma’s real premise: Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a local journalist with a hostile relationship to the police, looks across, and sees a man in that flat being stabbed.

She calls it in. The police come. There is no body, no blood, no evidence, and Grace is a reporter who has recently written a piece attacking the police department for its treatment of black victims — so the detectives, one of whom is Charles Durning at his most beautifully unbothered, take one look and decide she is grinding an axe. Philip Woode was black. The film knows exactly what it is doing with that.

The split screen is an argument

De Palma’s split screen has been imitated to death and almost always misunderstood, so it is worth being exact about the mechanic.

Hitchcock’s core insight, the one he explained repeatedly, is that surprise lasts a second and suspense lasts as long as you like — and the way to buy suspense is to give the audience information the characters lack. A bomb under a table nobody knows about is a bang. A bomb the audience can see is fifteen minutes of agony.

The split screen is that principle rendered as an image. Instead of cutting between the clean-up and the police — which would let you off, because a cut is a breath — De Palma refuses to look away from either. Both bombs are on screen simultaneously. You are watching the crime being concealed at the same rate as it is being approached, in real time, with no editorial mercy, and the tension is generated purely by the geometry of two images sitting next to each other. He also uses it earlier for a subtler purpose: a woman on one side and a woman on the other, the same frame divided, which is the film’s actual subject stated as a piece of visual grammar long before the plot admits it.

The debt to Rear Window is on the surface — a witness at a window, a crime nobody else believes, an amateur investigating because the professionals will not. The debt to Psycho is in the bones: a shocking early murder that decapitates the story, a transfer of the audience’s identification onto a survivor, an extended clean-up sequence that quietly recruits you into hoping the culprit gets away with it, and a psychiatric explanation delivered late by a man with a diagram. De Palma is not hiding any of this. I made the broader case for his method — the accusation of plagiarism and the defence of it as genuine authorship — in Brian De Palma, the voyeur’s cinema.

Herrmann again

And then there is the score, which settles the argument about intent. De Palma hired Bernard Herrmann — the man who wrote Psycho, who Hitchcock had discarded after a falling-out over Torn Curtain in 1966 — and Herrmann said yes.

What he delivered is a deliberate provocation. The Sisters score uses a Moog synthesiser alongside the strings, and it is used with total contempt for subtlety: a shrieking, wobbling electronic presence that arrives whenever Danielle’s condition surfaces, sounding like a nervous system in distress. It is not a Psycho pastiche. It is the composer of Psycho deliberately going further, giving a thirty-two-year-old admirer a nastier version of the thing his old employer had stopped wanting. Herrmann went on to score De Palma’s Obsession in 1976, and the through-line from Hitchcock to De Palma is, in the most literal sense, one man’s contract.

The choice of Herrmann is also De Palma’s honesty. He could have hired someone to write music that sounded like Herrmann, which is what the industry does. He hired Herrmann, put the name on the poster, and dared anyone to call it theft when the source was in the room.

Why it works

Sisters works because its formal games and its subject are the same thing. This is a film about a divided person, made by a director who divides the frame; about a woman being watched, made by a man who opens on a show about watching; about a witness whose testimony is disbelieved because of who she is, in a genre that runs entirely on whether we believe what we have seen. Every technique in it is an argument about looking.

It has real flaws. Salt’s Grace is written as an abrasive device rather than a person, and the film’s interest in her collapses in the final act. The psychiatric material is 1972 vintage and creaks accordingly. The last twenty minutes lurch into something closer to a fever dream than the precision-engineered thing that preceded it.

Its true origin, and the detail that makes the whole film stranger, is journalistic: De Palma read a Life photo essay about Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, conjoined twins in the Soviet Union who were the subject of decades of medical study. He took a real, documented case of two women who could not be separated and built a horror film about what separation would cost. That is the collector’s note worth keeping — the most Hitchcockian American film of the seventies started with a magazine spread about two real people.

Where to watch: the Criterion edition is the standard, and the split-screen material is one of the very few cases where screen size genuinely changes the experience — the whole gag depends on your eye being unable to attend to both halves, which a phone quietly solves for you and ruins.

The verdict is that this is where the American thriller’s most formally aggressive career begins, and it holds up as a machine forty years after most of its imitators seized. Follow it with Body Double for the same manoeuvre performed with far more provocation, or with Dead Ringers, where Cronenberg took the twin premise somewhere colder and more clinical. For the wider tradition, the doppelgänger film and the anxiety of the self has the map.

Spoilers below

Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins, and only one of them survived the separation.

The reveal is delivered in fragments — a documentary film Grace uncovers, a hospital record, Emil’s own account — and it reorganises everything. Danielle Breton and Dominique Blanchion were joined at the hip, exhibited and studied as a medical curiosity, and Emil Breton was the physician who separated them. He married Danielle. Dominique died in the operation. And Danielle has carried her sister forward as a personality ever since — a sweet, accommodating woman with a violent absent half who appears whenever Danielle is desired, and who does the things Danielle has been taught she must not want.

Which means the murder Grace witnessed through the window was committed by a woman who has been dead for years, and the person cleaning the sofa was the sister who loved her. Emil’s role is the film’s real rot: the surgeon who cut them apart, married the survivor, and has spent the years since managing his own creation with drugs and lies — a man who is doctor, husband and keeper simultaneously, and who dies for it.

The final act sends Grace into the asylum after Danielle, and De Palma abandons realism entirely for a hallucinatory sequence in which Grace is drugged and hypnotised and made to occupy Dominique’s position — the witness forcibly written into the crime she saw. When she comes out she testifies, flatly and sincerely, that there was no body, because that is what has been installed in her.

Then De Palma delivers the best closing joke in his filmography. Durning’s detective, hired by Grace, has been tailing the sofa — the actual sofa, with the body inside it, shipped north to a railway siding in rural Quebec. The last shot of the film is a man perched on top of a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere, watching a piece of furniture through binoculars, because nobody has told him to stop. The evidence is sitting in plain sight. The only person still looking at it is a man who cannot get down, and the film ends on him, holding, absurd and patient and utterly stuck — the voyeur’s reward, which is to see everything and be able to do nothing with it.