The Sisterhood of Night

Plot

The story begins in Kingston, New York where Emily Parris (Kara Hayward) decides to get back at her classmate, Mary Warren (Georgie Henley), for ruining her audition for a school play. While Mary, forced by the theatre teacher, holds her audition, Emily steals Mary's phone and publishes all of Mary's text on her blog. Mary then retaliates by calling Emily a blog whore in front of the whole school, which landed both girls in the guidance counselor, Gordy Gambhir's (Kal Penn) office. Later that night, Mary writes on her Facebook wall that she will be taking a vow of silence, and afterwards deletes her Facebook and all other social media accounts. This is when Mary gets the idea to create the Sisterhood, and the first members she recruits are Catherine Huang (Willa Cuthrell) and Lavinia Hall (Olivia DeJonge). Together, the three girls venture out into the night, disappearing into the forest by the city border, and begin their ritual.

By the next school year, the Sisterhood has grown into a common knowledge between the girls at school, though no one except for those who are in it really knows what's going on in the woods at night due to a vow of silence each girl takes, and the girls that aren't in it want to be, but each member has to be chosen by Mary. Emily longs to be in the Sisterhood, and when a girl named Hilda gets picked instead of her, she steals the folded paper square each Sisterhood girl is presented with from Hilda's bag. She then memorizes it and makes her own version when she gets home. After figuring out the meeting place, Emily follows Hilda and another Sisterhood girl to the woods, hiding as the girls begin their ritual. While snapping a photograph, she gets spotted and is next seen lying in her bed, posting a new update on her blog. The update describes how she heard the girls chant dirty things, undress and touch each other, and then cut Emily's hand with a knife before touching her too. Later, Emily runs into Mary during Mass and proceeds to make a scene about all the things Mary did to her. Emily then faints and wakes up to Mary saying how she will never be one of them, and then leaves with Catherine and Lavinia.

Mary, Catherine, Lavinia, and the rest of the Sisterhood girls uphold their vow of silence when parents, teachers, and even reporters (who all have read Emily's blog) ask them about the Sisterhood. Lavinia's mother, Rose Hall, searches Lavinia's room and discovers a doll with a pentagram-like symbol drawn on the stomach. After Lavinia returns from a Sisterhood meeting, she is confronted by her mother who finds the same symbol tattooed under her rib age. At the same time, two more girls come forward with the same confession that what happened to Emily happened to them as well, causing more hysteria to rise. Emily and the two girls come up with a plan on how they will get Lavinia, a fragile girl who's struggling with her mother's constant dating, to confess about what the Sisterhood is really about. Lavinia, angry at her mother, searches her room and finds a book called The Joy Of Sex, which she secretly reads at night, masturbating afterwards.

The same night, Mary accidentally finds herself alone outside while trying to avoid being caught for being out after the newly set curfew. Her original plan was to talk to Jeff, her boyfriend who she was dating in secret. Tired of being her secret, Jeff breaks it off, unwilling to be hidden anymore. Mary, broken hearted, had snuck out to reconcile with him, but he doesn't come to his window when she throws stones at it. Not knowing what to do, she turned to Gambhir's house. She manages to invite herself in, and she talks to Gambhir. Unbeknownst to them, they are observed by Sue Parris (Jessica Hecht), Emily's mother, who snaps a picture of the two of them, assuming they are in a sexual relationship. After taking some of Gambhir's prescription pills, Mary spends the night on his couch, and is awoken by her mother the next morning, having seen the photo Sue Parris sent out. Gambhir is then fired from his job at the school, even after both him and Mary swear nothing happened. Feeling that things are starting to spin out of control, Catherine and Lavinia try to convince Mary to tell everyone what's really going on, but Mary refuses to break the vow and promises that she'll fix it. Mary tries to talk to the parents and reporters to dispel the situation at a small press conference at the school, but Gambhir is present and is interrogated by the press and the angry parents, so Mary is unable to tell them what happened. Mary then fashions the now infamous paper square, just like the ones she gives to the Sisterhood girls, and gives it to Gambhir, inviting him to see for himself. He gets Rose Hall (Laura Fraser), Lavinia's mother, to come with him, and the two of them witness as the girls do nothing but stand in a circle around a fire, sharing their secrets, hopes and dreams out loud before burning the piece of paper with their written secrets in the fire, thus keeping them a secret forever. During this and through a montage of sisterhood meetings, Catherine and Mary reveal their biggest secrets; Catherine wishes for her mother to die or get better, she also misses her mom (it is implied throughout that she has cancer) while Mary admits that she wants to lose her virginity to someone she is in love with, and that she is in love with Jeff. The sisterhood walk away from the bonfire and sit and think in silence, while Mary stares at Gambhir and Rose, unbeknownst to the other girls. It is also revealed that Lavinia feared no one would ever kiss her, which she'd said during a sisterhood meeting.

Emily, who has been invited to a radio show to speak about her experience of being molested, starts having second thoughts about her plan to get Lavinia to talk, and decides to pull out, much to the dismay of her two friends, who still decide to go ahead with the plan. Emily tries to call Lavinia, warning her to not go out tonight, but it's too late, as Lavinia has already been lured to the woods by Travis, a boy she has a crush on. In the woods, Travis gets her to take her shirt off, and is then ambushed by the same girls who are friends with Emily. They hold her down while putting a witch hat on her head, forcing her to say that the Sisterhood girls are witches, and then make her touch herself, all while filming it with a video camera. They upload the video to the internet, drug Lavinia, and then take her to a Halloween party. At the party, they show everyone the video and start to spread it around, all the while calling Lavinia a freak, slut, and a whore. Unable to take the pressure anymore, Lavinia commits suicide by overdosing on her mother's medication.

During Lavinia's funeral, Mary, knowing that Lavinia had never been kissed, asks Jeff to do so, out of respect. Emily confesses to everyone that she made the whole thing up, that she wanted to be in the Sisterhood so badly and was angry when Mary refused to accept her, and she begs for forgiveness. Emily's blog is revealed to be a hoax, and Emily is persecuted. However, her blog is widely held on the basis that it had assisted an exceptional number of sexual abuse victims despite the false pretense of which it was made popular. Catherine shaves off all of her hair and visits her sick mother in the hospital (which is implied she is undergoing chemotherapy treatments). Mary and Jeff meet each other in the photo room and start a relationship. She and Catherine then decide to go through with a dance they had prepared, choreographed to Lavinia's original music, for school and do it in Lavinia's memory. Emily, who has finally received the Sisterhood paper square, stands at the set location and waits unsure as Mary comes up to her and invites her to join them. She then dances together with the rest of the Sisterhood girls down the streets of Kingston and into the woods. The movie ends with a narrative about how the Sisterhood will continue to be a secret to outsiders, that the secret will be passed on to new members and disappear into darkness.

Cast

Reception

The film received generally positive reviews, attaining a rating of 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and 63% on Metacritic.

Many critics have pointed out Georgie Henley as the strong lead in the film, citing that she has come a long way from her role as Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia. Inkoo Kang of TheWrap wrote in her review "there’s no dethroning Henley as the film’s queen bee, with the "Chronicles of Narnia" actress doing a pretty good impersonation of "Foxfire"-era Angelina Jolie: sexy but open-faced, curious but scheming, intimidating but inviting."