No Surrender Cinema: Seance (2021)
A group of students at an all girls school may not be the best of friends, but they do have one thing in common; someone, or something, is after them. Is there a killer on campus, or have the girls unleashed something much more sinister with their Ouija ritual? Let’s see what type of thrills and chills the new film Seance provides in this bonus edition of No Surrender Cinema!
Written and directed by jack of all trades Simon Barrett, who penned the terrifically insane You’re Next in addition to starring as one of that film’s antagonists, Seance is a film that keeps viewers off guard by giving off a different vibe every few minutes. At one point, the group of girls that serve as the major players throughout the film are bitching at each other during detention, then a little while later lights are flickering and people are seeing things that may or may not be real. Unfortunately for the student body at Edelvine Academy, something is causing their numbers to shrink, even if the headmistress is in a state of denial that would make Mel from Sleepaway Camp seem rational.
The death of one student, Kerrie, early on in Seance leaves an opening for a new arrival to make her presence felt on campus. The addition of Camille to the story gives us someone to simultaneously suspect and root for. She asserts herself quite well, not taking any crap from Edelvine’s resident “mean girl” Alice, and she bonds with another student named Helina. Naturally, when there is blame that needs to be placed on someone, Camille winds up taking the brunt of it, and it’s not long after she’s been brought into the fold that the friends and frenemies in her inner circle begin to get picked off one by one.
While it may seem obvious to the audience that Camille is acting as a red herring en route to becoming our Final Girl, the path to get there is not a direct one. Seance shifts in tone quite a bit; is it a ghost story disguised as a whodunit? A whodunit disguised as a ghost story? A 90’s style slasher a la Scream and Urban Legend with supernatural elements? It never truly leans heavily in one direction, at least not until we start getting the reveals that lead into the third act (and most amusing portion) of the film.
While the film did move a bit slow for my taste, the third act made up for it by giving us rapid fire revelations. Some may say that the big twist was nothing short of incredulous, but I appreciate how it helped to even the odds during the final showdown. There are also some extremely graphic kills during Seance‘s final moments, including the best usage of a light tube this side of a Nick Gage deathmatch. I was pleasantly surprised to see things get so intense, because the kills that took place earlier in the film were much more fleeting, leaving a lot of the damage up to the viewers’ imagination. It also helped that Seance had a good central cast, with Suki Waterhouse as Camille and Inanna Sarkis as Alice being the standouts.
Although I’d go as far as to call the vast majority of events in the film predictable, I don’t want to take away from Seance‘s charm. It held my interest throughout thanks to Barrett’s outside the box storytelling, silly as some of it may be. Especially That One Twist; you’ll know the one when you see it. It’s a doozy, but everything that happens from that point on was, as they say, worth the price of admission. Seance is a thriller that should do well here in the present day, but it’s also one that would not look out of place among the young adult slashers and ghostly tales that were constantly being churned out in the late 90’s through the early 2000’s.
SEANCE is In Theaters and On Digital and On Demand May 21, 2021.
