good? Which in this case means not terrible. It was, and I gag as I say this, actually. So imagine how shocked I was, shocked I say, when THE SÉANCE actually DIDN'T make me reflexively void my bowels. Firstly, as the Gravitas Ventures logo slithers off screen, I look for the ridges and troughs of the slug slime it leaves behind and secondly, I have to prepare myself to view a movie that is unconscionably execrable. 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.THE SÉANCE is a Gravitas Ventures production. 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. 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.Īn admirable misfire as a film, then, but the disc is more enjoyable. 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. It’s these, rather than the muffled attempts at tonal changes, that really show off Barrett’s ambition. That said, Suki Waterhouse is strong and consistent as Camille, handling the film’s generic shifts well. 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. 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. 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. But a catty horror-comedy needs to have much more visual energy than Seance in order to work. It’s a stance I agree with – sometimes ‘bad’ images have a power that the state of the art can’t match. Again, Barrett expresses some concern about this on the commentary, saying he doesn’t see why everything should have to aspire to 8K. 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. But those movies really looked like movies. 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 most of Seance just feels like a teen slasher movie, and not a particularly dynamic or unusual one at that. Occasionally it lives up to that – the girls yelling “Fuck off!” in unison when their seance is interrupted is much funnier than it sounds. ( 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. 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. It also spends a lot of time explaining Barrett’s tonal choices, which unfortunately shines a spotlight on how rarely they register on screen. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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