Shudder Saturday: Seance (2021)

This is on me. Totally. I saw the trailer for this and allowed myself to start feeling optimistic. It looked like an enjoyable horror movie with the emphasis on scares and a spooky atmosphere. That ended up not being the case. What we have is something on a par with a few other horror movies from recent years, a bit of a throwback that doesn't do enough to refresh or twist the tired material.

Suki Waterhouse plays Camille Meadows, a young woman who arrives at the Fairfield Academy. Her arrival comes not long after the death of a student, a death apparently caused by a ritual not a million miles away from the whole "Bloody Mary" thing that many people are familiar with. Quickly making enemies with a particular clique, Camille soon discovers that Fairfield Academy may have a ghost or two wandering the rooms, and someone may want her to reveal what really happened to cause their death.

Written and directed by Simon Barrett, who has previously directed a segment or two for the V/H/S series (and has written some great films, such as You're Next and The Guest, and the oft-forgotten Dead Birds), this is a film that very deliberately chooses to go in one particular direction in the third act, and that direction didn't feel like the right choice for me. That's a real shame, particularly when one or two moments in the first 2/3 of the movie are enjoyably spooky and hinting at a much better movie (the same movie that the trailer seemed to be selling).

Waterhouse isn't a very good lead, although she's not helped by the way her character is written, and none of the other main cast members do enough to stand out. Madisen Beaty, Inanna Sarkis, Ella-Rae Smith, Stephanie Sy, Djouliet Amara, Jade MIchael, and Seamus Patterson are all getting name-checked here because of their screentime, but I'd say that only Sy and Smith come close to making a decent impression, portraying two very different characters that at least don't feel as interchangeable as everyone else in the main group.

I suspect a lot of people will like this much more than I did. It's technically very well done, and I appreciate the fact that Barrett isn't afraid to make use of things like flickering lights and ghostly figures glimpsed ever so briefly alongside some of those flickers, but it feels like Barrett started the film with one approach in mind and then began to doubt himself. He should have had a bit more faith in his own ability to use, and revel in, the ghostly aspect of his plot. Somewhat paradoxically, something so old-fashioned and "creaky" feels fresher and more enjoyable than the familiar third act, which basically turns into a bit of a Scooby-Doo ending (without the fun).

It's not a terrible viewing experience, and does enough in between the dull moments to just about make up for those dull moments, but it's disappointing. Very disappointing. Although it would have been less disappointing if it had been released about twenty years ago, when most of the big supernatural films released went for the same kind of ending.

4/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Clovehitch Killer (2018)

Relationships between children and parents can often go through periods of turbulence. Rebellious years, growing pains, suspecting that your father is a serial killer. All of these things can cause some strain. That last issue may be a rare thing indeed, but it is what the lead character here ends up dealing with. 

Charlie Plummer is Tyler, a well-behaved young man who tries to stay on his best behaviour around his parents (Samantha Mathis and Dylan McDermott). His worst behaviour is sneaking out with his dad’s truck to meet a date. Which starts off a horrible chain of events, all because a small pornographic photo is found in the truck. This piques Tyler’s curiosity about the local deaths caused by “the clovehitch killer” (someone so named because of their favoured knot). Tyler teams up with Kassi (Madisen Beaty), a young woman who is slightly obsessed with the case, despite the fact that no murders have been committed in years. Things soon get more worrying when evidence starts to point to Tyler’s dad as the main suspect. 

Boosted considerably by the pairing of a great cast doing some of their best work and a finely-tuned script by Christopher Ford, The Clovehitch Killer is a great slow-burn thriller that sits nicely right in between the believable and the . . . cinematically believable (so not too believable, but there's enough done to help you enjoy and believe it all while things are playing out). Director Duncan Skiles allows everything to be sold by the acting and the structure of the screenplay, and knows when to show more and when to keep things hidden away. Things seem very obvious at certain points, but the twists and turns are all done in a way that allow you to consider how the characters may still find certain things plausible, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Plummer is an excellent young lead, very believable as he starts to lean into some behaviours that his parents would frown upon in his quest to get to a truth he may not really want to accept. Beaty is a great co-star alongside him, a teenager who happily treads her own path, and someone with a very understandable reason for digging deeper into the case of "the clovehitch killer". Mathis and McDermott are both just as good as the younger cast members, and McDermott gives a performance that easily ranks up there with anything else he's done over the years. He's almost unrecognisable at times, and every interaction he has with his family members, and particularly his son, is played absolutely perfectly.

It's a film with very few surprises, and one that could have been made as a short with some adjustments, but this is one of many movies about the journey, rather than the destination. And that journey is a hugely satisfying one, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved. Not flashy, not gory, not exploitative, what you have is simply the result of a group of talented people who all have faith in the material that they're working with. And the end result shows that they were right to have that faith.

8/10

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