The Dead Child Reveal – The Snow Sister Vs Worst Years of My Life

Both movies are very flawed. I’ll just say that first. The Snow Sister is pretty boring. And Middle School: Worst Years of My Life ought to be called Worst Days of My Life – it makes a lot more sense in the context of the film. Not to mention I’m sure those meant-to-be-Donald-Trump vibes I’m picking up from the headmaster are no coincidence. And those are just some quick, easy examples. But today I’m going to talk about one thing they have in common that I thought was interesting.

They both have a dead child reveal, and what I mean by that is one of the characters is revealed to actually be dead –ghosts, one who doesn’t want to move on, and the other who remains with his brother until he has made friends  – effectively until the living brother has moved on. In a way, both films in actual fact are about both characters in each film moving on. The protagonist in Snow Sister has also suffered a sibling death, but is a different dead child he interacts with – going for a parallel of some sort. Both films also have quite a bit of focus on the impact on the whole family, and the protagonists have cut themselves off from everyone else, informing their behaviour. 

Okay, so let’s get on with the differences, for a start in Snow Sister you know about this sibling death very quickly. It doesn’t matter that you do, as this having happened is not part of the twist, and is there so everything is in context from the outset. You need this, as otherwise the protagonist’s interactions and behaviour would make no sense, and just make you turn off. (It’s tempting to do that anyway!)

Worst Years is different. Because of the interactions between the protagonist and – you suppose – a long-term friend who also got expelled from their previous school and ended up in the same final school that would take him by good fortune, you are a lot more engaged and can see the likeable side to him without knowing more than the bare minimum about his history. There is also more story which helps with engagement, and stops you questioning the reality you are being presented with – a distraction technique, but not a bad one. The truth about the sibling death only comes out much later, a few scenes at most before it becomes apparent (due to video footage) that the friend never was physically present, leading to the rest of the reveal.

The reveal in the Snow Sister was clear to me as soon as the ghost girl was introduced. If you have read/watched Tom’s Midnight Garden or When Marnie Was There it’s obvious straight away. The hints that follow are obvious too – parents not there, the girl’s odd reactions, and so on. This is not a good combination, especially combined with an unengaging (and lack of) plot. It would be too easy to work out even without the hints or its closeness to other properties, and the film gives you reason to start trying to work out what’s going on too. Even if you didn’t work out what was going on (maybe you’re not an active viewer that way) it’s likely you’ll just get frustrated, leading to dissatisfaction. In Worst Years, you don’t work out the twist because you have no reason to think after the ‘friend’s’ introduction scene that there is anything to puzzle over.

So is Worst Years better than Snow Sister, at least in this respect? Not necessarily. The thing about a good twist is it needs to have good hints so that on a re-watch the explanation is obvious, however, as with many a twist villain these days, if these hints don’t actually exist (or are so insignificant it comes to the same thing – looking at you, Bellwether), then it is just a bad twist. 

Whether you can see it coming or not is far from the whole story, after all I knew straight out with the Snow Sister because I happened to have watched and read the right things to see it. In some ways I can’t help but think that Snow Sister simply had too many obvious clues to this end (as well as being way too similar to the aforementioned properties), while Worst Years had too few clues. In other words, they both did it badly, just in different ways.