Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This is a review of a film from The Great Canadian Horror Film Festival that just concluded. Click here to find information surrounding the upcoming The Great Canadian Sci-Fi Film Festival.

Alexandra Senza operates within the classic realms of horror storytelling — particularly on the topics of body possession and nightmarish prophesies. However, she has a more contemporary topic in mind within these horrific conventional safe spaces, thus rendering her film current and promising: the curse of trauma. While Flee the Light doesn’t outright follow a story solely of lingering trauma, it progressively crawls with these pulsating after effects forever on your tail. We have a pair of sisters trying to console one another, and at the root of the anguish at the heart of the film is an ancient force that is trekking its way to the present, awaiting a body and mind to leech off of. You can label the monster as a memory or the dread of a certain thought and you could be right. I feel like this creature is symbolic more than literal, so you can place any reality here and you’d be right.

As life continues and the film progresses, the fear gets closer and closer. The protagonist can feel its presence nearing, and even exclaims that there’s no way to avoid it: it can only arrive any moment now, and we can’t lie to ourselves. Once the horror arrives, Flee the Light plunges into straight up possession horror, and it allows the previews of the special effects and makeup from previous sequences to go hog wild (some really strong work for an indie film, I must say). Otherwise, the film’s largest scares come from the anticipation of what is going to happen, and even the everyday returns to reality — and seeing the aftermath of a horrible night’s visions — end up being the most frightening parts of the film. The anxiety of worrying about what’s to come is quite affecting here, and it plays into the film’s strengths the most.

Alexandra Senza’s Flee the Light is fun when it is at its most standardly horror, but it winds up being its most honestly shocking when it shies away from these formulas. If Senza wishes to continue making horror films, I would say that her best avenue to explore would be the moments in between the scares, because she doesn’t use these pauses as moments to cool down (outside of the occasional time for relief), but instead to cause you to feel your most uneasy. This is a testing of thresholds, and I feel like it is the gift that Senza has presented us in her latest work Flee the Light.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.