Review: Seance (2024)

The Newport Beach Film Festival was the perfect place to feature Seance, a psychological thriller period piece within a mansion by the sea.

A seance is a gathering of people who are linked together in an attempt to communicate with the dead. The methods may vary but it usually consists of a group of people linking hands around a table and utter some provocation together to invite the spirts to speak. Most of the time, nothing happens and the people just laugh it awkwardly and some relief. Then there are those few times when something does answer back. Hopefully it may be a friendly voice or it just may be from something that should have remained silent.

During Seance, a woman named Emma Strand (played by Scottie Thompson) is enduring a seaside vacation with her second husband (played by Connor Paolo). Their marriage is still new and both seem to be struggling with issues arising from miscommunication and also with intimacy. Their tense outing is interrupted by the very awkward arrival of Emma’s first husband George (Played by Jilon VanOver). This must be a teeny tiny beach. Of course, George arrives with his new wife by his side, Lillian (played by Vivian Kerr, who is also the director of the movie). Nature seems to desire some drama as a powerful rainstorm forces the two couples to take refuge together at George’s home. It’s cold, dark, and it’s just the four of them during a rainstorm. Perfect time to call out the dead.

Not everyone is happy to be conducting the ceremony but pity leads the party down the stairs and around the table. The pity is from one of a child that has recently passed and the parent is still heavily grieving, unable to cope with the loss of their child. Emotions are already high by the time they’ve all gather around the table, each person dealing with their own mental soup of unhappy feelings. The minute the hands are clasped, they are now forever bonded due to what they experience the rest of the night. Will it all be supernatural or something even more sinister?

Thankfully, the producers spent more time on the movie than the trailer. The trailer promises to give a scary period drama in its never ending edits of flashing scenes. With that expectation, I was ready to hide behind a pillow in anticipation of jump scares and chilling visuals. None of that happened.

The psychological thriller shifts into a mystery as the night drags on revealing confessions and revelations. It soon became clear that this is definitely not what was advertised. Thank goodness. For what it did deliver was a mesmerizing piece that made the viewer detangle the relationships between the couples to glimpse the truth. It is a journey to go from automatically fearing the potential of a supernatural scare to uncovering something even more eye brow raising. Seance is really a drama during a very, very long night. During this super long night of a rainstorm, no one sleeps. Absolutely no one. So the audience is treated to guests running around rooms in their ethereal night gowns

The visual framing of the movie seem to set an atmosphere of the film being completely detached from reality. Despite the indication that it’s a rather substantially large seaside home, we only see a small portion of it as the characters are primarily within the dining area, the nursey, the bedrooms, and the front doorway. No matter which room they’re in, the edges of the room are shrouded in thick shadows. It seemed like a subtle nod towards the early cameras where the aperture created the bright radius on the screen. There was also the curious staging of the scenes that seemed more theater-like than it did movie

It really created a very spooky period film. It really expands the period piece drama to something beyond balls and marriage dilemmas. This movie was more realistic and yet so fantastically strange. This was thankfully not a typical thriller film. Seance is dramatic mystery of a pair of couples dealing their own mental unraveling. It just needed a bit of a ghostly catalyst.

The film is currently circulating around film festivals. For more information: https://ruedangeau.com/seance.html