Following the death of a girl during a prank, pupils at an exclusive
girls' school are targeted by a killer.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Simon Barrett
Starring: Suki Waterhouse, Madisen Beaty, Ella-Rae Smith, Inanna Sarkis, Seamus
Patterson, Marina Stephenson-Kerr
Spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s and slasher movies of the early
1980s often shared the same template. A prologue usually showed the
death of someone at the hands of a group responsible for their demise.
In spaghetti westerns the victim was always downright murdered while in
slashers their death was usually through misadventure, more often than
not as a result of a prank going wrong. The movie would then cut to some
later point in time, when those responsible find themselves targeted by
someone out to avenge the victim.
With his directorial debut Seance, screenwriter Simon Barrett (You're Next;
The Guest), seems to recognise this curious correlation between two sub-genres
that share little else in common.
Following the established template outlined above, Barrett's film opens
with a bunch of senior students at a prestigious girls' academy (so
exclusive it seems to be entirely run by a single faculty member with no
more than a dozen students ever seen) playing a séance-based prank on a
fellow pupil, Kerrie (Megan Best). The girls are shocked to later
find Kerrie lying dead in a pool of blood, having seemingly fallen from
her dorm room window. Was it an accident or was she pushed? And if she
was pushed, was it by a fellow student or by the ghost rumoured to haunt
the academy?
Seance begins to take a turn towards the spaghetti
western with the arrival of Camille (Suki Waterhouse), a new
student taking the place of Kerrie, along with the dead girl's dorm
room. Like a tartan-skirted niece of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name,
Camille immediately begins to make enemies, standing up to and refusing
to back down from the bitchy clique that runs the school (Barrett
repurposes the classic western saloon standoff to the school's canteen).
Seemingly visited by the spirit of Kerrie during the night, with her
dorm light flickering and a shadowy figure appearing in the darkness,
Camille begins to investigate the girl's death. While doing so, other
students start to meet their demise at the hands of an unidentified
assailant.
Waterhouse has always been a curious presence. Nobody would call her a
great actress but she has a uniquely deadpan manner that's always fun to
watch. Barrett has tuned into her exact wavelength here, crafting a
taciturn character perfectly suited to the English actress's eccentric
charm. In recent years it feels like every actress is getting their own
version of John Wick, and I guess this is Waterhouse's. Barrett wrote
one of the most memorable genre heroines of the past decade with the
protagonist of You're Next, who is introduced as an unassuming girlfriend only for it to be
slowly revealed that she possesses what Liam Neeson might describe as a
specific set of skills. Waterhouse's Camille comes off like a cousin of
You're Next's heroine. She manages to elicit laughs without ever having to
wisecrack or deliver punchlines. With her too cool for school delivery,
Waterhouse turns otherwise innocuous lines into small moments of comic
brilliance. At one point Camille gives a fellow student (Ella Rae Smith's Helina) a baton for protection. When asked if she won’t need the
weapon for herself, Camille replies "No, I have… other stuff." Later she
knocks on the same girl's door and tells her "My room is definitely
haunted, can I stay with you?" On paper those words have no impact but
Waterhouse's druggy delivery makes them sound like they were written by
IAL Diamond.
Barrett's genre mashup doesn't always work. Visually it's far too flat
to evoke the requisite atmosphere, and little is done to exploit the
potential of its gothic setting (why is it that the only old buildings
in the US are colleges?). Barrett and cinematographer
Karim Hussain indulge in visual gimmicks like the use of fish-eye
lenses, which do little to enhance the mood or move the story
along.
Surprisingly the horror aspect of Seance is its weakest
element. It's far more successful when it's playing out its
High Plains Drifter in a girls' school subplot, thanks to
Waterhouse's performance, which I genuinely believe is one of the year's
best in any genre. Amid all the over-the-top genre referencing, there's
a surprisingly realistic portrayal of the awkwardness of teen romance in
the relationship between the cool Camille and the shy Helina, two girls
dying to jump each other's bones but terrified into inaction by the
thought of rejection.
There's little to convince that Barrett has a career in directing ahead
of him, but at its best Seance does for the spaghetti
western what Rian Johnson's
Brick
did for hardboiled detective dramas. Barrett has a lot of fun
transplanting a very masculine genre into a world of teenage girls, and
frankly, I'd rather face a pistol-packing bandit over an angry
17-year-old girl any day.
