Chanting into a mirror to awaken the spirit of a dead girl is a surefire way to start trouble. It’s right up there with using a Ouija board, or reading a passage out loud from a musty book. Simon Barrett’s (YOU’RE NEXT; THE GUEST) SEANCE opens with the former, and even though it’s intended as a prank, good intentions don’t matter when you’re messing with the dark side.
Alice (Inanna Sarkis) is the clear shot-caller in her group of friends, all who seem to be thriving within their pecking order in the group and their chosen level of meanness. The staged chant spooks one of the more timid girls, Kerrie (Megan Best), and not long after returning to her room, her friends (“friends?”) find her dead – pushed out her dorm room window by a ghost who wasn’t so happy to be called up in a phony ceremony.
Her vacancy and room at Edelvine Academy are quickly filled by Camille (Suki Waterhouse), a quiet young woman who crosses Alice and her group on her first day. Their over-the-top reactions to her mistake lead to a physical altercation, where Camille handily kicks ass. Unexpected from a studious ballerina, but Camille – like Erin in YOU’RE NEXT and David in THE GUEST – has a few stories to tell. After the ruckus, the mean girls, Camille, and her assigned tour guide, Helina (Ella-Rae Smith) are sent to work on a tedious scanning project in the library as their detention. Banding together to make faster work of the project, they form an uneasy cooperation, but when Alice and friends decide to hold a seance to see if they can contact Kerrie and see what really happened to her, their unexpected connection to the other side gives them answers to questions they shouldn’t have asked in the first place.
At one point, Helina rationalizes, “no one is stupid enough to actually try it.” But luckily, they are, and there’s the basis of this entire subgenre of movie. Not that teenage girls are stupid, just that they haven’t realized yet that the world doesn’t actually give much of a fuck about them. Young women are owed nothing and vengeful ghosts could care less about a little blood splatter. SEANCE starts with a large group of characters, and that makes the whittling down of their numbers both inevitable and fast. The earlier deaths are largely handled off-camera; shiny knife blades and droplets. By the finale, the gruesome and gore have both ramped up, leaving the climax of the film a blood-soaked mess. The ride is so subtle you don’t realize your seat belt clicked off until you’re through the windshield.
Both literally and metaphorically, you know when light bulbs start crackling, some serious shit is about to go down. There’s a lot of crackling lights in old Edelvine Academy, which stands stoic and starched, a stony fortress of dark classrooms and dorm rooms. In and outdoors, gloom pervades through every corner. But Barrett has crafted at its center, a love story – then wrapped it in a glittering ghost story, tied in a slashery ribbon. For genre fans, the nods are abundant and clear: SUSPIRIA, CANDYMAN, even MEAN GIRLS. The bones of two previously mentioned Barrett-penned films, YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST, are the structure underneath the school uniforms. The Sickerman score is impeccable, and it has kept me company for a lot of hours since the movie ended.
At first glance, I thought of SEANCE as perfect sleepover cinema, the non-pejorative genre for the kinds of movies that horror-hungry youngs can watch in the middle of the night together. But seen by virgin eyes, so many of the giallo-inspired hat tips and other inspirations might be lost – still an enjoyable watch, but maybe not as rich as for a viewer who already has a head full of horror. Either way, the truth remains that there’s not much more scary than a teenage girl.
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