Summary
“Our Little Sister” suffers from being too short and cliched to explore its better ideas, and a late twist can be seen coming from a mile away.
I’m fairly confident that no good things have ever come from inviting a creepy doll into one’s home. Honestly, what is the upside? The first episode of Terror Tuesday: Extreme, ominously titled “Our Little Sister”, tries to justify the idea as a salve for grief, but its devotion to one of horror’s classic cliches quickly reveals that, as I thought, dolls are always bad news.
The appeal of this doll is that it isn’t, technically, a doll. It is presented as a legitimate replacement for a human being, a way to channel the soul of a lost loved one into a new vessel that is to be treated as though it’s a living thing. But no such luck. It’s a terrible idea on every level, and Episode 1 of this Thai Netflix anthology proves it with all the enthusiasm in the world — but not so much of the quality.
Enter The Doll
“Our Little Sister” begins with the aftermath of a car crash. A vehicle is upturned, smoking. Aye and her mother are trapped inside it. Elle, Aye’s sister, has freed herself from the wreckage only to walk right in the path of a passing truck. What’s the expression? Out of the frying pan, into the grille?
Elle’s death leaves Aye suffering from PTSD and boasting a nasty-looking scar down the length of her spine, and her mother almost catatonic with grief. As Aye explains to a doctor, things aren’t going well.
The doll is presented as the solution — Elle is reborn as a plasticky monstrosity who is bound by a very stringent set of rules. She has to eat three meals a day, savory and sweet; she has to be put back in her box before midnight, and she must remain within an area of the property designated by “sacred string”, which is a good name for a band.
The problems with this logically are evident from the get-go — they might as well have put a sign outside reading: “You Are Now In A Horror Story” — but the issues with acting and tone show up right after when Aye tries to describe the doll to her friend Toom and he responds by… exaggeratedly imitating her dead sister. Human beings don’t communicate like this, do they? I’d even expect better from the doll.
The Doll Is A Manifestation Of Aye’s Grief and Guilt
Aye (Cherprang Areekul) in “Our Little Sister”
Speaking of the doll, its sinister bona fides are established quickly. It sits watching TV but turns to face Aye in a jump-scare, its lips contorting into a CGI smile.
Since Aye’s PTSD — and the fact she’s medicated — was established very early, the audience is inclined to suspect that she is imagining the villainy of the doll. She is also nursing a tremendous amount of guilt for Elle’s death since she was driving the car. This underlying bit of psychology informs the plot’s mechanics. The doll isn’t just a haunted bit of porcelain, like Annabelle — it’s a manifestation of Aye’s underlying grief and feeling of responsibility.
Showing an alarming lack of self-preservation instincts even for a horror lead, Aye opens the doll’s box after midnight on literally the first night. Here, “Our Little Sister” reveals its most intriguing twist on the format — the doll morphs into Elle herself. But not “herself”, obviously, but an evil, blameful version who implies that Aye is just like their father, who abandoned the family for another woman.
But there’s also the suggestion that the real Elle, identifiable by a bloodstained dress and injuries incurred during the crash, is trapped inside this dark doppelganger, and thus the doll, struggling to get out.
Pacing Issues
The brevity of “Our Little Sister” — like all episodes of Terror Tuesday: Extreme, it runs about 40 minutes — really hurts it. Within the space of a scene or two, Aye’s mother is off her meds and cooking the family pet for dinner. By the halfway point she has descended into full-blown murderous psychosis, knocking Aye out and dragging her to the basement, serving her boiled Jib-Jib and a tall glass of insecticide, apparently at Elle’s behest.
The same ideas are reiterated again — that Aye is to blame for the crash, and that she is just like her father. Aye’s mother’s fiendish master plan is to poison herself and Aye so that the family can be reunited, but she makes the laughably obvious error of drinking her own share of the poison before she force-feeds Aye hers. After chasing Aye around with a knife for a while after she resists, Aye’s mother eventually just collapses and dies from poisoning.
Isn’t that stupid?
The True Twist Of “Our Little Sister”
Aye and the dolls in Terror Tuesday: Extreme Episode 1
Before Aye can break the doll’s spell by dragging it beyond the sacred string border, she’s jumped from behind by a giant monster-looking woman who starts choking her to death. While she’s dying, she does indeed envision an idyllic reunion with her mother and sister, but the fantasy is interrupted when her mother stabs the monster in the back with the same knife she was trying to stab Aye with moments before. The monster drops to the floor, now the doll again. Aye’s mother also dies from insecticide poisoning again, but not before imploring Aye to get the doll out of the house.
Aye manages to get the doll out of the house and beyond the sacred string, which reveals the true twist of Terror Tuesday: Extreme Episode 1. In another vision of the idyllic reunion, Elle tells Aye she has to forgive herself. When she comes to, the slash wounds on her hands from the knife attack are gone. The house is no longer on fire. Jib-Jib is chilling in his cage. And there’s another doll lying next to her, one wearing her mother’s dress.
It Was All A Dream
When “Our Little Sister” returns to the framing device of Aye talking to the doctor, the truth is revealed. Aye’s mother died in the accident. It has been Aye not taking her meds. Her conversations with Toom were imagined. Her worries about her mother being exploited by the shaman were just her subconscious telling her that she was being taken advantage of.
This begs the obvious question of how much of what we saw was real. Aye definitely acquired the dolls, since they’re still there even after her crushing realization (the episode ends with her just sobbing in the rain, flanked by both.) But given the disappearance of her injuries and the lack of evidence of fire or commotion, I’d say all the supernatural and murderous business occurred only in Aye’s head.
In essence, Aye was preyed on by someone who sought to take advantage of her grief by selling her two useless dolls. What did I tell you at the top? They’re never a good idea.
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