Seance (2021): standard slasher with one killer extra (Review)

It won’t be my favourite film of the year, but Acorn media’s Blu-Ray release of Simon Barrett’s directorial debut Seance contains an early contender for extra of the year. Barrett begins the director’s commentary with disarming enthusiasm, saying he’s always loved director’s commentaries and is excited to be providing his first one. And it shows – at a point where more and more new films are being released either straight-to-streaming or on bare-bones discs, Barrett’s commentary is a fond but unsparing examination of the trials and tribulations of making a low-budget film. Every compromise, every corner cut, is explained, but the overall impression is that Barrett and his cast worked hard on something that they know isn’t perfect but they’re still proud of.

It also spends a lot of time explaining Barrett’s tonal choices, which unfortunately shines a spotlight on how rarely they register on screen. Barrett is probably best known as a writer and co-producer on Adam Wingard’s films, two of which – The Guest and You’re Next – he describes as horror versions of John Hughes scripts. (Uncle Buck and Home Alone, in case you were wondering) On paper, Seance‘s school setting moves him a little closer to Hughes territory, with a little of Heathers‘s bitchy black humour mixed in. Occasionally it lives up to that – the girls yelling “Fuck off!” in unison when their seance is interrupted is much funnier than it sounds. But most of Seance just feels like a teen slasher movie, and not a particularly dynamic or unusual one at that.

The problem, I think, is visual. I have to admit that I passionately hate the John Hughes movies Barrett loves, and the ongoing cultish devotion to the 1980s as a zenith of artistic achievement is mostly baffling to me. But those movies really looked like movies. Seance, with its aggressively ochre colour grading and impenetrable shadows, looks like streamable content, its theoretical shifts in tone and wild plot twists suffocated by a cloud of Netflix-era visual gloss. Again, Barrett expresses some concern about this on the commentary, saying he doesn’t see why everything should have to aspire to 8K. It’s a stance I agree with – sometimes ‘bad’ images have a power that the state of the art can’t match. But a catty horror-comedy needs to have much more visual energy than Seance in order to work. The Blu-Ray sleeve promotes Seance‘s shared producer credits with You’re Next, a film which is also pretty damn brown, but that film’s early high-speed dolly-in on a maid’s head wound communicates the gleefully macabre tone more efficiently than anything in Seance.

Without the direction and cinematography to back them up, some of Seance‘s forays into Mean Girls territory feel less like enjoyable comic caricature and more like plain unsubtle characterisation. At least Inanna Sarkis is having fun as the school’s queen bee Alice, though her nastiness is undercut by the fact that our ostensible heroine Camille seems no more concerned about the film’s opening death than she is. That said, Suki Waterhouse is strong and consistent as Camille, handling the film’s generic shifts well. It’s these, rather than the muffled attempts at tonal changes, that really show off Barrett’s ambition. The film’s core ambiguity – are these deaths the work of a ghost, or a human killer? – is far from original, but Barrett manages to keep the mystery going for much longer than you’d expect. Whenever he has to misdirect the audience, the film’s images suddenly become more distinctive and interesting; maybe if he could write a story which was all fake-out, in the manner of Carnival of Souls, he’d deliver on his promise.

An admirable misfire as a film, then, but the disc is more enjoyable. Seance premiered on Shudder, and someone – perhaps Barrett himself, judging by that commentary – has worked hard to justify the physical release with some fun extras. There’s a featurette, deleted scenes and outtakes, as well as a look at the pre-visualisation for the film’s show-stopping decapitation – which proves that, if nothing else, Barrett knows his audience.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – SEANCE (2021)