Director: Simon Barrett
Year: 2021
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Arriving at a prestigious boarding school, a woman joins a group of girls with ties to an accidental death of a fellow student and tries to help them investigate what happened, but when they start dying one-by-one come to believe the rumors of a ghost on campus might be true and try to stop it before it takes them.
Review:
This was an enjoyable if somewhat flawed genre effort. When this one works well is the generally enjoyable and chilling atmosphere of the boarding house setup. This gets quite creepy at times, as the ability to capitalize on the setting including the darkened, falling-apart building featuring tons of shadow-play, flickering lights, and a series of scenes featuring something lurking out of the darkness to blow out lights unexpectedly. This setup brings out some rather creepy scenes here with the failed seance at the beginning, the prank in the storage room where they get their prank turned around on them and the revelation about how everything ties into the legend of the murdered girl at the school which sets them off on the journey to uncovering more about her which fuels the final half.
There’s also a lot of fun to be had here once this one gets the killer loose and starting to knock people off. The first few attacks, with the masked figure appearing suddenly around the now-split-up group to generate some suspenseful attack scenes, start this off nicely into later scenes. After the reveal happens and the plans for everything are known, this gets incredibly fun and enjoyable over time as the confrontations that arise here with the survivors confronting the human killers and their plans getting interrupted. These provide a strong sense of action here with the brutal back-and-forth encounters that have a lot of stalking, a series of fun brawling trying to get the upper hand, and tons of great gore in the impressive kills featured here. These generate enough to like that hold it up overall.
There isn’t much wrong here but it does have some issues. Most of those drawbacks come from the predictability and generally cliche approach here. The film tends to feature tons of factors from dozens of Ouija-board-summoning genre efforts, including the homemade planchette and presentation, the board behaving oddly that no one admits to doing, the investigation into the original girls’ disappearance that starts everything, and the authorities that are acting way too suspicious for their own good. These all come off as way too frequently utilized in these kinds of films and can make this one feel less original than what it really is. This one does run on a bit too long with several false endings that don’t need to be there, but otherwise, there’s not a lot to really dislike here.
Overview: ***.5/5
While there’s not much really wrong here, the few flaws that stand out here drag this down just enough from the positives that it’s a slightly flawed but enjoyable enough genre effort. Give this a look if you’re a fan of these kinds of genre features or intrigued by the setup, while most others that are turned off by the style or approach here should heed caution.
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