Seance review – mean girls meet mean spirits in high-school horror

Simon Barrett directs with lurid video lighting and comically bad gore effects to deliver what looks like a cheap Italian horror film

At Edelvine, an exclusive boarding school for wealthy, willowy young ladies who all look 10 years too old to be in school, a clique of students gather in a dorm bathroom to summon the fabled Edelvine ghost. The exercise turns out to be a prank the school’s final year mean girls are playing on bullied, speccy, but still willowy Kerrie (Megan Best). But after Kerrie falls out of a window minutes later, the students wonder if their seance actually summoned a malign spirit from beyond the grave. At least poor Kerrie’s death opens up a place at the school for Camille (Suki Waterhouse, from Assassination Nation), a young British woman who refuses to be bullied by senior queen bee Alice (Inanna Sarkis) and her coevals.

A scuffle in the common room leads to all of them doing detention, and before you can say “Candyman” they’re all clustering round a homemade planchette to do yet another seance (the ninnies). Inevitably, people start going missing and the body count rises as director Simon Barrett tries to keep viewers guessing as to whether there’s a real supernatural agent at work or a more corporeal culprit, such as an off-campus pervert or the like.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3F5f2gS