Saint Clare - FrightFest UK Premiere Review
Director: Mitzi Peirone
Starring: Bella Thorne, Frank Whalley, Rebecca De Mornay, Ryan Phillippe, Jan Luis Castellanos
Written by: Mitzi Peirone, Guinevere Turner
Produced by: Thor Bradwell, Arielle Elwes, Joel Michaely
Cinematography by: Luka Bazeli
Original Score by: Zola Jesus, Philip Klein
Synopsis:
In a small town a solitary woman is haunted by voices that lead her to assassinate ill intended people and get away with it, until her last kill sucks her down a rabbit hole riddled with corruption, trafficking and visions from the beyond.
Thoughts:
Part high school drama, part serial killing thriller 'Saint Clare' really struggles with its identity and despite some fun scenes is a bit of a mess tonally.
Bella Thorne plays the titular character Clare Bleecker, a sixteen year old Catholic schoolgirl. Yes. This film is trying to pass Bella Thorne off as being sixteen years old. Clare is supposedly just your average highschooller but she's harbouring a dark secret; she's actually a serial killer and her preferred victims are creepy abusive men. Clare has been murdering men for years and hasn't been caught yet and that's partly because she gets a little assistance from some voices. Well more than voices. Bob, a prior victim played by Frank Whalley, appears to Clare every so often to give her advice when she needs it.
Clare begins to poke her nose in the wrong persons business and soon things begin to spiral out of control.
Director Mitzi Peirone is clearly a talented filmmaker. She's won awards at previous film festivals for her debut feature film 'Braid', but her overuse of weird camera angles here become exhaustive very quickly. It's clearly an attempt to make the film visually more interesting and I applaud her work ethic but it gets very annoying after a while and even a little jarring. And she seems to like the camera to move around a lot and spin too but it feels wholly unnecessary.
Overall the performances are a bit of a mixed bag. I just felt that it was difficult to take any of it too seriously because, as I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this review, the tone is all over the place. Perhaps more styilized editing would've created more balance to the tone. I think the main issue is the script itself. I think the original script was written by Guinevere Turner with Mitzi doing rewrites and I know it's insanely common to have multiple writers but this really suffers from it and it really does feel like they were writing separate scripts.
Bella Thorne isn't a bad actress but sometimes she just goes a little too far. Sometimes less is more and acting can be more about what you don't say rather than what you do. She feels miscast here. Frank Whalley is a joy to watch. He isn't onscreen for that long but he lights up every short scene that he appears in. It was nice to see Rebecca De Mornay again and she does add a little bit of gravitas to the cast but her inclusion sadly still fails to inspire. She plays Clare's grandmother who is now her legal guardian. Ryan Phillippe seems to be having a ton of fun as a shady, almost cartoon villainous cop but once again it's difficult to take seriously and the stakes didn't feel real. And another thing I found astonishing is not only that Clare is supposed to be just sixteen years old but that during one scene where she is heavily drugged and tied up, she is able to miraculously overcome the sedation and suddenly turn into Black Widow from the Avengers, jumping over chairs, high kicking the bad guys and overpowering them with triangle chokes and other marine-like techniques. They really push the fact that she has a connection with God and even teasing that maybe somehow she has some sort of divine powers..?
The film is based on the 2021 best selling novel 'Clare at Sixteen' by Don Roff, which has been described as being a young adult version of 'Dexter' and I can see that for sure in the film adaptation too. I'd be confident in saying that if you're a fan of the Netflix show 'You' then this might be up your street as it's got a similar narrative style and I assume that the novel was also probably inspired by 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', although the film doesn't exactly support that claim. I've never read the book and I have no compulsion to do so after watching this. It's a solid premise but sadly the execution is a bit off.
Verdict: ⭐️⭐️
-Gavin Logan
'Saint Clare' received its UK Premiere at FrightFest '24 on August 25th with a Digital release from 101 Films later in the year.
Comments