It is impressive a supernatural slasher taking place in a gothic boarding school of lesbian schoolgirls manages to be dull and uninteresting. The gory elements are tame, jump scares land flat, kills uninspired and mostly offscreen, and you’re failing with your villain when the slasher from ‘Happy Death Day’ is more iconic and memorable. Major beats are predictable, red herrings are glaringly red and obvious, and major twists are… Nonsensical. Not that the twists avoid predictability in that, you know there’s going to be a twist and you’ll know when a twist is coming, but the nature of the twists seemingly come out of nowhere, by characters you barely recognize and from motivations never hinted. The best I can say is the film is aggressively generic and tepid right up to maybe the last 10 minutes which exponentially increases the intensity and violence, albeit absurdly. It looks very pretty, as the direction and framing is decent, the actresses are committed adults playing cliches of high school students and the initial setup was worthwhile, as the rest this could have been if the script had any quality behind it.
Seance (2021)