Saint Clare

Saint Clare will sneak up on you as it did me. It’s a murder mystery with dark horrors and giggles blended delectably.

Despite a stronger premise this time, “Clare” echoes the filmmaker’s prior feature in remaining on a highly worked surface — one that doesn’t illuminate people and events so much as treats them like decorative pawns in a game whose rules, as well as its casualties, ultimately feel inconsequential.

Even while Thorne's performance proves effective enough to keep us attached to her story, the rest of Saint Clare's cast fails to attain the same feat.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

The spirit of religious promise that Perione’s film introduces goes quizzically betrayed. What ensues becomes an attempted campy teen thriller, but without the tension or reward.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.