Simon Barrett burst onto the scene with his collaborations with Adam Wingard, particularly the genre-bending home invasion film You’re Next. Since then, he’s put out intriguing script after script and I was excited to see his first real foray as a director with his latest film Seance. On paper, it has all the staples I love to see. A foreboding and Gothic boarding school. Ghosts. Murders. A fascinating lead character. Genre-defying antics. Unfortunately, Seance is more a stumble than a home-run.

After a cold open in which a group of students play a prank on a fellow student named Kerrie (Megan Best) that ends with her apparent suicide, Seance introduces new student Camille (Suki Waterhouse). Camille has been on top of the Edelvine Academy’s waitlist for quite some time and, starting in the middle of the year, she has an upward battle. And that’s before she’s put in the dead student’s room, where the lights are constantly buzzing and flickering in and out. The cabal of mean girls who pranked the room’s former resident to death have decided that Camille must be taught a lesson, but she proves more than a little resilient as she punches the head mean girl Alice (Inanna Sarkis) in the face. The brawl leads Camille, her new friend Helina (Ella-Rae Smith), and the group of somehow interchangeable mean girls in detention, where they must digitize the school’s archive.

Bored, the group decide to makeshift create a planchette out of a stick of lipstick and a phone case to try to contact Kerrie to see how and why she died. Kerrie warns them that there actually is a ghost haunted Edelvine and that “she” is going to kill them...before the planchette launches itself into a candle, sending the room into darkness. Later that night, one of the girls is murdered while taking a selfie outside and her belongings disappear. What follows is a somewhat typical stalk and slash as someone (or something) creeps around the school, picking off its members, one by one.

It was hard to tell due to screener compression, but the look of Seance seemed to have a lot going for it. The way Barrett stages the school and the camera positioning and angle choices from cinematographer Karim Hussain brings to mind the boarding school horror films of yesteryear. The somewhat doe-eyed new girl being immediately thrust into conflict with a clique of mean girls brings to mind Argento films such as Phenomena or Suspiria, the latter of which is somewhat referenced through a ballet plot point. But Camille is no Suzy or Jennifer and Suki Waterhouse is probably the secret weapon of Seance. Her character somewhat transcends and subverts the protagonist you’d typically see in these films and Camille has a bit more agency, particularly as the film progresses to the third act. It just doesn’t push the issue enough and the character comes across as another wilting teen protagonist without much of a personality.

The same goes for most of the cast, who feel interchangeable in their cattiness. Barrett has written intriguing female characters before; characters who flip the script on the traditional tropes they initially represent. But the characters here are all one note and even though Camille is given a somewhat fascinating backstory, it doesn’t come together as well as his better works. A somewhat clandestine queer romance is also under-developed to the point of queer-baiting annoyance. The trailer suggests this might be a major draw of this film and yet the relationship is barely suggested, save for a couple scenes. One, in particular, felt like the furtive start of something bigger and was actually a nicely realized scene. But for the most part, Seance is frustratingly empty of the queer romance the trailer teased. This queer-bating, coupled with uninspiring kills and characters, makes Seance a rare stumble for Simon Barrett.