The Bad Sister is the last of six films that the filmmakers and theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made during their partnership. Among the film’s notable contributions is its engagement with the broad question of “the specificity of the medium,” a key issue in the critical debates shaping the art world of the 1960s and 1970s. The Bad Sister was in fact made for television: Launched in 1982, the UK’s Channel 4 gave experimental cinema a new outlet, which, considering the British film avant-garde’s organization at the time, marked a significant step forward. The idea was to take advantage of certain possibilities offered by the medium of television, such as the use of special effects enabled by computer and video technology—this project marked Mulvey and Wollen’s first use of these techniques. This hybridity is very palpable in the film, which bears traces of various experimental approaches yet still delivers on the promises of a thriller. 

Their decision to adapt Emma Tennant’s 1978 novel—itself a rewriting of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)—legitimizes a formal shift toward the fantastic. In Tennant’s version, Hogg’s male characters become female. The concepts of dualism and doubles are central to the narrative: Jane Wild, the protagonist, is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner. Uncertainties surround her potential involvement in the deaths of her father and sister. Meanwhile, her mother has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Under the sway of an enigmatic guru named Meg, Jane slips into deep trances that fuel her thirst for revenge. Feminist themes are also evident in Tennant’s novel: it explores a young woman’s struggle to free herself from the patriarchy, an oppressive domestic life, and perhaps even her heterosexuality. It is clear, however, that a story’s linear unfolding holds little interest for Mulvey and Wollen. The film stands out for its introspective explorations and minimalist aesthetic, as well as the unsettlingly strange atmosphere permeating it. While the formal techniques used to blend reality and dreamlike spaces may seem dated, they bear witness to their historical era, the 1980s, not just in terms of music but also when it comes to a tendency to “dissolve" modernist legacies. The film engages with these issues in a particularly incisive manner.

When it aired on Channel 4, on June 23, 1983, The Bad Sister attracted two million viewers, a figure well above the norm for experimental cinema.

Clara Schulmann, 2021
Translated by Elisabeth Lyman