Mark Reviews Movies: SEANCE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

Simon Barrett shows a few flashes of inspiration in his feature directorial debut Seance, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Some of those flashes arrive at the start of this story, delving into the possibility that a boarding school's urban legend is something very real, and most of them come near the end, as we learn the true motives and nature of the movie's mysterious protagonist. Everything in between mostly feels like generic formula, with a handful of clever moments.

The beginning, though, is a solid kicker. A group of teenage girls, all of them students at an exclusive boarding school in the middle of nowhere, have decided to test the authenticity of one of the school's most enduring ghost stories. The reality is that a student committed suicide in the community bathroom of the dorm. The legend is that, if one holds a candle and summons the dead girl while staring into the bathroom mirror, the ghost will appear—and make a ghost of whomever did the summoning.

The scares that immediately follow appear to be a prank, perpetrated by the popular clique of teens at the school against Kerrie (Megan Best), who has fallen out of the group's favor for whatever reason popular teenagers stop liking someone. A startled Kerrie, who thinks the appearance of a girl in the bathtub is real, rushes back to her dorm room. A light in the room starts flickering. Kerrie senses someone—or something—in the dorm with her. The other girls, laughing at their successful prank, hear a scream. They find Kerrie, lying dead on the ground outside her window.

The rest of the story is essentially a series of mysteries and a few killings, none of which seem particularly supernatural but, then again, neither did Kerrie's violent end. The main puzzle is who or what killed Kerrie and starts killing other members of the popular girls' clique.

A side one involves Camille (Suki Waterhouse), who arrives as a new student at the school (The headmistress, played by Marina Stephenson Kerr, says she's lucky a spot opened). She seems to have it out for the popular group, led by Alice (Inanna Sarkis), from the start, getting into a brawl with them in study hall. There are other oddities, such as Camille's poor ballet dancing, despite her transcript saying that she studied it for years, and the fact that she seems to talk to someone in her dorm room—Kerrie's former residence—when no one is there.

Barrett is basically playing an indecisive game here, suggesting that ghosts are real but asserting that whatever is leading to the girls' untimely, violent deaths is something—and someone—of the real world. Camille, her only new friend Helina (Ella-Rae Smith), and the popular girls receive detention for the fight. Someone has the bright idea to hold a séance to communicate with Kerrie's ghost—to find out if she committed suicide, was murdered, or had a close encounter with a supernatural presence. The ritual seems to work, and gradually, more members of the clique go missing or turn up dead under "accidental" circumstances.

This is mostly routine, from the shallow mystery to the few scenes of horror. Barrett does display some flair for the morbid payoff in the case of the latter. In one creepy scene, we see one of the students killed, after spotting a figure behind a tree while taking a selfie and then taking an accidental memorial portraiture. In another, a foggy bathroom hides both a ghost/murderer and a spillage of soap on the floor. The sound design of one sequence, which takes place on the eerily decorated stage of the school's theater, builds, not to a crescendo of startling music on the soundtrack, but to complete silence—interrupted almost immediately by the pounding of fast footfalls on the wooden stage floor. Barrett's instincts in such scenes lean toward the relatively subtle and, hence, the more frightening.

So much of this, though, is caught up in its mystery—both the ones we know from the start and the ones Barrett wants to keep a secret until the third act—that it hardly has time for much else. Camille is an intentional blank slate, because any information—about who she is or, for that matter, isn't—would give away too much of her purpose in the climax. The popular girls exist to establish exposition, provide conflict, or to be killed, and while the bond forming between Camille and the kind Helina offers some respite, it's eventual destination shows how much Barrett has written around to make room for the killings, the red herrings, the back story, and the overwhelming air that we're not supposed to know what's really happening.

The climax reveals all, some of it—such as the real killer and a rather underwhelming explanation—part of the formula and a bit of it—such as the truth about Camille—a satisfying jolt amidst the routine. That's essentially the whole of Seance: a little that's effective and a lot that's familiar.

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