Flee the Light
It’s Andra’s birthday and her sister Delfi wants it to be perfect; the first attempt at breakfast overcooked, she throws it out and starts again so as not to spoil the day. She doesn’t want to let Andra know that she’s started seeing things again, in the halo of the sun behind the clouds, in the visions of dark-robed women dancing in the forest, so real it almost feels like a memory, while upstairs, oblivious, Andra dreams of being pulled underwater.
Increasingly disoriented and out of sorts, Delfi finally confesses to Andra who accompanies her to a dubious art therapist who is perhaps predictably unable to help and instead suggests she visit a spiritualist; Andra already unconvinced, a telephone conversation with the medium leaves her even more apprehensive, but Delfi has her own plans, taking them into the wilderness of Ontario to a place she has never been yet which she knows, recognising it from her visions.
A supernatural thriller directed by Alexandra Senza from a script by Jennifer Mancini, Annie Tuma and Ariana Marquis star as sisters Andra and Delfi, presumably orphaned young in that their parents never feature in any of their memories seen through flashback yet living independently, the first of many conveniences which give Flee the Light an unseemly momentum.
The cryptic crazy woman on the phone having told Andra that her sister is haunted, prompting Andra to her own confession of an unexplained youthful experience in a seaside car park, a walk in the birch forest at North Bay swiftly brings a vision of the coven of the mysterious Kata which guides them to “a place of power,” the local tavern where the present-day acolytes gather for their ceremonies.
Unravelling with earnest determination rather than careful plotting, flashbacks to a group of pilgrim girls camping in the woods and experimenting with the local edible herbs fail to illuminate the story of Andra and Delfi and the evil of swirling black smoke which is attempting first to possess one then the other of the siblings, nor how it relates to Jane Siberry’s black-draped matriarch, ageless agent of the trees who performs exorcisms to allow souls to “recycle.”
Delfi wandering the woods which to her are full of skulls and totems (“I’m seeing with my mind!”), Marquis is required to be a perpetually wide-eyed girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Flee the Light hoping momentum can compensate for incoherence, ambitiously setting itself up for continuation when even a single date at the Wiccan mixer night is an ordeal to wound the unprepared.
Flee the Light will be available on Digital Download from Tuesday 15th February
