Film Review — "Departing Seniors"
Masking a string of high school murders as teen suicides is so fucked! And morbidly brilliant, I dare say.
The killer slashing the wrists of the first victim, then pushing him into a pool to bleed out and drown, give me an immediate “oh shit” moment. It was clear from the jump that this killer’s style wouldn’t be extravagant or super grisly, out of necessity. In other words, the cold open establishes that the deaths themselves are not the main thing to write home (or blog) about when it comes to Clare Cooney’s Departing Seniors.
Clare Cooney’s direction is highly competent. I mean, the picture looks great. I love when a director cares about visual quality and wants the audience to be able to see their film. Color and contrast can get you far and elevate your game, and I’m glad that Cooney seems to agree. The filmmaking is proficient. Departing Seniors is not formally daring, or innovative, in any particular way, but that’s okay because the stars are truly the stars here.
The co-leads—Ignacio Diaz-Silverio and Ireon Roach—are the big standouts. Their charm and charisma carry the entire film. Diaz-Silverio imbues so much life into Javier, and it’s so refreshing to have an openly gay, expressive Mexican-American teen character at the center of a slasher movie. Matching Diaz-Silverio’s effervescence is Ireon Roach, who blesses Bianca with her own flavor of vivacity in every scene. They’re both so delightful that you just kinda accept it when a homophobic prank leads to Javier developing psychometry—the ability to see a person’s past or future when you touch them, like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone (“The ICE! Is gonna BREAK!”). Naturally, Javier and Bianca leverage this newly-gained power to catch the killer who’s terrorizing their graduating class.
I swear, psychic characters make for fantastic gay fodder. Carrie White, Jean Grey, Oda Mae Brown, Raven from That’s So Raven… You’d be hard pressed to find a nerdy fag who doesn’t stan at least one of them. Thankfully, this time the psychic is actually, textually gay. So, hooray for that!
The whole premise is kinda silly, but also pretty enjoyable. Like, it’s not exactly meant to be taken seriously; it’s meant to be a good ole time.
Those who value an emphasis on character and performance will have a better time than those who covet bloodshed. The gore fiends will likely walk away from Departing Seniors disappointed because the kills are definitely not the main attraction. After all, the deaths need to be able to read as self-inflicted in order to work. So, there are no decapitations or elaborate eviscerations to be seen, which is fine because Ignacio Diaz-Silverio and Ireon Roach consistently deliver and make up for it.
If I were to critique the film based on the kills, it’s not that they aren’t showy enough—it would be that the film chooses to not really dig into how profoundly fucked it is that a masked psycho can just go around killing teens unnoticed for so long because the community just chalks it all up to adolescent suicides. Like, oh well, it happens! That’s why I said above that the very idea of that being a slasher’s MO—in addition to being sick as hell—is narratively brilliant. Maybe not going deep on it was a storytelling choice; I suppose balancing such a heavy theme with the humor would’ve proved tricky. Or maybe we, as the audience, are meant to be complicit, in not thinking anything of it ourselves…
