A remake of theDanish film Midsommer, Solstice is an underseen 2000s oddity. Its floating-heads style poster full of recognizable faces harkens back to the teen horror of the ‘90s, while its Louisiana bayou setting evokes a Texas Chain Saw-esque promise of tension and terror. On paper, Solstice looks like a slam dunk; names like Amanda Seyfried, Tyler Hoechlin, and Shawn Ashmore leap off the cast list. Loaded with starpower and potential, the film’s omission from the teen horror canon is glaring – and largely unjustified.
One of the potential hurdles is the plot, which is muddier than the swamps of Louisiana. Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) has recently lost her twin sister Sophie to suicide. At the insistence of her friends, she agrees to head to her family’s cabin to celebrate the solstice. They meet up with handsome Cajun townie Nick (Hoechlin), who can’t stop casually mentioning voodoo and general mysticism. As the titular solstice nears, Megan begins experiencing what can only be described as a haunting. Objects are moving, cars are stalling, and her dreams are wildly upsetting. She assumes her sister’s ghost is trying to communicate with her. Nick, being the holder of arcane bayou knowledge, feeds into her beliefs. And then we careen into the film’s finale and all that gets swept away.
In 2008, as torture porn’s grimy grasp was finally loosening, the horror landscape appeared a little… unfocused. While PG-13 hit Cloverfield was dominating the box office, films like Martyrs, The Loved Ones, and The Midnight Meat Train proved the genre hadn’t lost its mean streak. But even as horror began its transition from the "extreme" to the somewhat more contemplative, studios continued to look backwards for inspiration. New offerings came in the form of toothless remakes (Prom Night) or US adaptations of popular foreign releases (The Eye). In that regard, Solstice slots into the year’s lineup perfectly, its rating and loose adherence to the source material an unfortunate reality of the genre landscape.
Despite the title, the actual solstice doesn’t really matter much in the film. Nick indicates it’s the best time to talk with the dead, as the veil is thin. But aside from the cool location and the summer setting, it’s not additive. In the original Midsommer, much of the tension comes from their location as opposed to a specific date or event, rightfully delving into the obvious folk and nature horror tropes – something Solstice fails to do. Instead, Solstice spends most of its time establishing intrigue and seeding doubt, abandoning the folklore in favor of a more grounded murder mystery.
Its aforementioned PG-13 rating also becomes a hindrance. Unlike the similarly overstuffed casts you’d see in movies like Scream or The Faculty, there’s no body count in Solstice. Aside from Megan’s sister who died a year earlier – and a fun comeuppance in the film’s finale – no one dies onscreen. In and of itself, this certainly isn’t egregious. But when the herd isn’t thinned in a film like Solstice, you feel it. Characters wind up being superfluous, stakes fall instead of rise, and the plot gets bloated. In a film packed with charismatic young actors, no one ends up having enough screen time. And when no one dies, every character foible compounds, until you end up hating everyone. PG-13 doesn’t have to mean boring, but so often the lack of explicit blood leads to a lack of…anything.
And all of that would justify the film’s obscurity were it not for one thing: when Solstice focuses on atmosphere over story, it is delightfully creepy and weird. Megan’s dream sequences are gross. Especially if you’re put off by fingernail trauma. Add in the copious gagging-up-mud scenes and breathless looking around, and you’ve got some truly disturbing imagery of a young woman haunted. Directed by Daniel Myrick of The Blair Witch Project fame, one of Solstice’s obvious strengths is its visuals. Long shots of the group’s middle-of-nowhere vacation house evoke TCM, the mucky swamps a feeling of being captured. This evocative visual storytelling sets a delicious table for the film’s final – and absolutely unhinged – 15 minutes.
Once things get moving in Solstice, they don’t stop. The uneven pacing makes the truly wild twists and turns of the final act easy to write off. But make no mistake, this left field reveal is what the movie was always leading up to.
Throughout the film, Shawn Ashmore’s Christian is a pretty squirrelly guy. It’s easy to write off due to trauma as Megan’s twin sister Sophie was once his girlfriend. But as the finale approaches, his territorial, anti-Cajun Nick sentiment gets aggressive. And when the true nature of the ghost haunting Megan is revealed, well, it feels awfully familiar. You see, Christian and Sophie actually hit a young girl with their car the previous solstice. Fearing for his future, Christian convinces Sophie to bury the girl’s body and hide the truth. Wracked with guilt, Sophie ends her life, leaving Christian the sole survivor of the accident. Now back at the scene of the crime a year later, the super-thin solstice veil allows the girl-ghost to leave clues for Megan. But Megan spends most of the film mistakenly thinking the ghost is actually Sophie. *deep inhale*
Once the truth is revealed, the ghost scares Christian and he runs into the road to get hit by a police car. It’s a real full-circle moment that leaves viewers wondering when exactly the movie turned into I Know What You Did Last Summer. And that’s what’s so frustratingly wonderful about Solstice. While it 100% plays like an IKWYDLS knock-off, the way it gets to that plot device is fascinating, and the obfuscation of the twist makes the twist simultaneously more and less effective; it’s so well buried that we forget to even look for it.
So when it happens, during the film’s final frames, it’s disorientating. Every seed was planted. Every thread pulled. But the pacing and execution leaves one feeling late to the party, presents already open, cake already devoured. While in 2008 these quirks might work against it, today, they add to its mystique. And that’s what’s so fun about time and distance. As if by magic, there’s a new “I know what you did last year” style movie filled with up-and-coming talent. Something new to pair with sun-soaked summer horror favorites like Midsommar and Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
In many ways, Solstice feels like a victim of expectations. The rating, poster style, cast list, and even the title promise a very specific experience that the film itself doesn’t deliver. The atmosphere overshadows the body count, and instead of a tame slasher, viewers are treated to an unwieldy whodunnit set in the gorgeously filmed Louisiana swamps. By rebuking many of the era-specific tropes it silently promises, Solstice manages to carve out a unique spot for itself, proving a forgotten curiosity – not due to quality, but because of the very things that make it so refreshingly unique.
