Killing All My Sisters
Oh no. Should Erin or I be worried?
Fortunately, the sisters in the title of this 2024 Lifetime film are not biological sisters. (Or blood sisters, in tribute to the Halloween season.) They’re sorority sisters. Well—one of them is. Most are just pledges, so they don’t really count yet. Don’t get me wrong: killing sorority sisters is still bad. It is simply not as bad as killing a biological sister. Of course, only one sorority sister actually dies on screen, so “all my sisters” is doing a lot of marketing work. It’s a Lifetime film. It happens.
Emily (Isabella Carlsen) is worried because her roommate, tennis phenom Jenna (Muguet Del Toro), is trying to join the Beta sorority. (“Beta forever!” Is that really a good slogan?) Led by Brittany (Grace Patterson), the house is deeply committed to hazing. Emily refused to join after a trust exercise nearly sent her off the roof of a multi-story building. When Jenna disappears, Emily is convinced Brittany’s ex-boyfriend Spencer (Stephen Gray) abducted her. The police won’t take her seriously because Jenna hasn’t been missing a full 24 hours, so Emily drags her artist mother Allie (Muretta Moss) into the search. Becoming a Beta, it turns out, can be dangerous.
Haylie Duff directed. She has starred in enough Lifetime movies that if this had been made ten years earlier, she probably would have played Emily. I have liked some of her other directing work, but Killing All My Sisters falls curiously flat. Too many scenes meander, as if no one had the nerve to tell Haylie the shot added nothing. In a movie that is supposed to be a race against time and which is supposed to be suspenseful, we get a lot of scenes that don’t actually do anything to tighten the drama. Indeed, the narrative often seems to move at a rather casual pace. We get an entire scene of Emily’s mother flirting with the neighbor. It adds up to nothing. I mean, it’s nice that Mom is still making the effort. Emily’s no longer living at home so why shouldn’t a conversation about landscaping turn into more? The scene itself just sits there.
The mystery is easy to solve. There is a bit where Emily announces she has to look for Jenna and then stands in the middle of campus looking left and right. I have to admit that I laughed out loud before I started narrating: “Is Jenna behind that tree? Maybe she’s coming out of that building?” The bigger problem is that some of the most important events happen off-screen. We had time for Mom hitting on the neighbor. We did not have time to watch a fairly important character wake from a coma and name her attacker.
This movie makes me glad I never joined a sorority. I was invited, same as I was invited to try out for cheerleading in high school. Neither was for me. I like my independence. I like my movie nights.
