Movie Review: Seance (2021)
Written and directed by Simon Barrett (You’re Next, V/H/S), Seance is a horror film about a group of students at an academy who attempt to summon the spirit of the Edelvine Ghost by chanting into a mirror, only to have one of their group mysteriously fall to her death out of her room window shortly after. Initially, it was just meant to be a prank, but they find that a spirit is actually present. Or is it? Spoilers ahead. If you want to see a spoiler-free summary, skip to the last paragraph.
The story picks back up after the girl had fallen out of the window with a new girl named Camille (Suki Waterhouse) arriving at the school who moves into the room of the girl who had died. She immediately gets into a fight with the other girls in the first scene playing the prank, and things get weird from here on out. The girls get detention for the fight and decide to perform an actual seance in the library. They don’t have an ouija board so they use a phone case and lipstick and all touch the phone case at the same time while asking the spirit questions.
Some spooky moments happen here and there, and there are a couple of deaths, and the film starts progressing but it seems to have conflicting visions of which direction it wanted to take to get to the end. The initial story leans heavily in the direction of the ghost, but for some reason takes a real sharp turn late in the movie and disregards a lot of the main focal points.
It seems like what they were trying to do is create this atmosphere where there was a story about a ghost, but there wasn’t really a ghost and the killer was actually just someone pretending to be the ghost. The problem with this is that they already established that there was a ghost and it is seen by people throughout the movie. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to establish this and then discard it entirely near the end, but that is what happens. It is also mentioned early on that one of the students just won a $250k college scholarship, and that person is later revealed to be involved in the killings. Seems kind of weird that the winner of something like that would still be involved. There were a lot of things like this that just didn’t really make sense in the writing. Like one of the people being able to build crawlspaces throughout the entire school.
Overall, Seance isn’t really a great horror film, but it wasn’t necessarily bad. The premise is not new, some of the ways things were written didn’t really make sense, and the movie is supposed to be based on a “seance” but that entire plotline takes a back seat to a pretty mundane twist near the end. That being said, it did have some redeeming qualities. The acting was good, there were some nice practical effects for the gore in there, and the production quality was nice. We would say that this film might be good for someone new to horror or maybe some teenage sleepover or something but probably won’t resonate as well with seasoned horror fans.
Seance will be releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray on August 3rd. The Blu-Ray has some fun special features like director commentary, outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage, and our favorite which was the decapitation pre-viz. Check out the trailer below, and if you watch it, let us know what you think!
You can rent it here to watch on Amazon Prime as well:
