The Seance
2022 · 13m · United States
Directed by Jensen Rule Tierra
Genres: comedy, horror, LGBTQ+
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
A grieving skeptic is talked into visiting a psychic medium, whose seance conjures his late husband’s spirit — and long-buried secrets.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief-haunted skeptic + a phony medium should be easy prey for subversion, but instead this leans into the absurdist theatrical bit without ever truly upending what we expect—it's comfortable in its own queerness rather than weaponizing it.
The film understands its lineage in theatrical horror-comedy and executes with formal control, though it doesn't quite transcend the seance-comedy tradition enough to linger in the way the best hybrids do.
The real move here is the tonal pivot in the final act—how the absurdist performance suddenly drops into genuine vulnerability when the secret surfaces—and that shift in Tierra's direction is what transforms a clever premise into something that actually lands.