Review: Seance (2021)

Seance (2021)

Rated R for bloody horror violence, language and some drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

Teen horror not only seems to be making a quiet comeback right now, it's doing so in a way that more people honestly should've seen coming. It's happily lifting from the post-Scream teen horror movies of the late '90s, to be sure, but it's also lifting from a different medium altogether: namely, the pulpy young adult horror novels of the late '80s and '90s like Scholastic's Point Horror line and R. L. Stine's Fear Street series, the latter of which was recently adapted into a three-part movie for Netflix. (Speaking of, I ought to catch up on the second and third parts of that one. I liked the first.) I first noticed it on Barnes & Noble bookshelves a few years ago when it seemed like horror was making a comeback in YA literature, becoming one of the new trends in such after the decline of sci-fi dystopias, and so I predicted that it would soon start to creep into horror cinema, especially given the simultaneous wave of nostalgia arising around the Scream movies, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the rest of the "meta" teen horror boom. And sure enough, here we are, with a movie by Simon Barrett with a pulpy mystery/slasher/possibly supernatural plot that feels, for better or worse, like a Christopher Pike novel adapted to the screen, combined with heavy use of dark academia aesthetics and Barrett's usual touches of retro style that altogether call to mind the '70s without feeling wholly indebted to it. The plot is thin on the surface, but has quite a few layers to it beyond the obvious, especially where the protagonist's motives and the supernatural elements are concerned, leaving just enough mystery to keep me wondering after. It's nothing groundbreaking, leaves a bit too much to the imagination, and isn't as good as Barrett's previous films You're Next and The Guest, but it was still an interesting trip.

Set at the Edelvine Academy, an elite all-girls boarding school in what looks like New England, we start with a group of mean girls playing a prank their classmate Kerrie involving a fake haunting by a ghost reputed to inhabit the school. Soon after, Kerrie dies for real, falling out her dorm window in what looks like a suicide, though one of the last things she sees is a mysterious figure stalking her beforehand. Shortly after, a new student named Camille Meadows arrives, and immediately gets on the bad side of the queen bee Alice and her clique of friends while standing up for the unpopular Helina. When they all get sent to detention following the ensuing fistfight, Alice comes up with the idea to hold a séance to contact Kerrie's ghost and find out what really happened to her. This sets into motion a series of events that sees the girls get stalked and killed one by one by a masked murderer who may be the Edelvine Ghost, or Kerrie, come back from beyond to teach these little brats a lesson... or it could be something else entirely, an all-too-human killer using the legend of the ghost as a cover for their own agenda.

This film was a lot better at crafting the mystery than it was in ultimately resolving it. The killer turned out to be forgettable with a motive that wasn't all that interesting, and the killer's performance didn't do a whole lot to elevate them as a real menace like the memorable Ghostfaces in the Scream movies. It felt like the actor was going for a rather cold, detached performance to emphasize the character's petty fixations at the expense of humanity, but it didn't really come through in either the writing or the performance that this character was an emotionless sociopath. Given the killer's motive, I would've personally gone more for "neurotic nerd", somebody who's so afraid of failure, especially in the eyes of their parents, that they're willing to kill to cover it up. Where it struck out with the killer, however, it made up for with the heroine Camille. At first, I didn't know quite what Suki Waterhouse was going for with her snarky, deadpan performance, but as the character's layers were peeled back, I started to realize that she was the one who probably had everything figured out long before I did. She's the only one who's not impressed by the hauntings that the characters experience, or by the obnoxious attitudes of her classmates, with her English accent and lack of social graces making her an odd duck amidst the Yankee preps around her. It's clear early on that she has something to hide and has an ulterior motive for coming to this school when she did, just as people started dying, and I was intrigued watching her journey and her friendship with Helina. And all that comes before the ass-whooping she inflicts during the climax. She felt like somebody who's seen a ton of these movies, and read a ton of these books, and can't help but roll her eyes at some of the petty human evil she encounters, like if a horror fan were dropped into a teen slasher. Waterhouse made for a great heroine, somebody who, without spoiling anything, felt less like a traditional final girl and more like Dr. Sam Loomis from Halloween.

Barrett's first outing behind the camera without his frequent collaborator Adam Wingard also looked like a feast for the eyes, not the work of a rookie director. The look of the Edelvine Academy and the girls within it felt lifted from the mood board of a teenage girl who has variations on "witchy vibes" within her search history, and it did a lot of heavy lifting where it came to building atmosphere. Save for two brutal kills at the end to remind you that, yes, this is an R-rated slasher, this is a movie that relies on creeping dread over gore in a manner that recalls the slashers of the '70s, with the kills treated in an almost matter-of-fact manner but the buildup to them being something else entirely as a creepy masked figure who may or may not be a ghost is stalking the girls, waiting to strike. The emphasis on tension feeds into the central question of just how much of the film's events are supernatural or mundane, and the points where the two intersect make for great fun as the film led me along all the way to the very end. When it became clear that both were in play, I would've liked to see them interact a bit more, perhaps with certain characters getting some unwelcome surprises that could've livened up an otherwise unspectacular reveal. That said, while the ending left a few too many loose ends for my liking, many of the unanswered questions it left were enticing rather than annoying.

The Bottom Line

Seance is fairly shallow yet highly watchable movie with very different stylistic influences from your usual retro slasher, influences that elevated it along with a standout turn from Suki Waterhouse. Definitely something to throw on for the Spooky Season.