Solstice

SOLSTICE

Co-written and directed by Dan Myrick of Blair Witch Project fame, Solstice (released in 2008) follows a young woman named Megan whose twin sister Sophie died of apparent suicide at a Christmas party.  The June after Sophie’s death, Megan heads with some friends (Christian, Zoe, Alicia, and Mark) to an isolated house owned by her parents for a week of rest and relaxation.  En route, the group stops at a general store, and there Megan meets Nick (a clerk who gives her a free copy of Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to news about flying saucers, spontaneous human combustion, and the like).  Megan studies an article about communicating with the dead, which is allegedly easier to do on and around the summer solstice (which conveniently is just a couple of days away).  Megan later returns to the store and invites Nick over for dinner, thereby creating a love triangle with Christian as the third party.  Nick facilitates an impromptu séance prompted by Megan’s insistence that she’s been sensing Sophie’s presence since arriving at the house.   During and after the séance, Megan has quick flashes of visions that make no sense to her.  She ultimately sees a particular location in the woods that she passed through while jogging, and she insists that the group head out there and dig (she’s convinced that it’s where Malin, a little girl who went missing in the area in the past, is buried).  Turns out Megan’s exactly correct, and the discovery of the corpse prompts a confession from one of Megan’s friends (I won’t spoil which one) about a dark secret involving the confessor, Sophie, and Malin.  The confession neatly ties up all the loose story ends just in time to prevent the plot from seeming disjointed. 

Solstice features some shocking and chilling images (a couple of times a spirit manifests as a black silhouette with red eyes) and is relatively entertaining for yet another entry in the ghost(s)-want-to-communicate-clues-to-the-protagonist-and-reveal-the-truth sub-genre (Stir of Echoes is a superior variation on this type of tale).  At times Megan is a passive protagonist while elsewhere in the plot her actions drive the story (like when she trespasses in and explores the house of Leonard, a seemingly creepy recluse who lives across the lake).  Solstice seems for a long while like an uneven project that has switched MacGuffins mid-stream (Megan starts off wanting to communicate with her dead sister and ends up more interested in the missing local girl), but the final few minutes wrap up all the narrative threads neatly.  Solstice kept me hooked not through clever dialogue or memorable characters (the film unfortunately lacks those elements) but through the need to know what would happen next and how the various mysteries would pay off.  A plot-driven (rather than character-driven) movie that gradually parcels out the backstory about Sophie’s death through a series of flashbacks, Solstice will keep you guessing about what twists and turns the story’s spine will take from scene to scene.  I enjoyed this project more than I expected to and recommend it.