Selah and The Spades

The level of craft in Poe’s feature debut exceeds that of directors with more experience and portends a long career with more wonderful art to come. In Selah and the Spades, she has created a new classic tale of power, love, hate, loyalty, and betrayal featuring a stunningly talented cast.

Selah and the Spades shimmers with youthful promise, both in front of the camera and behind it.

It’s closer to horror than the usual lightweight fare one finds in the genre.

With its clean staging and coolly mannered style, Selah and the Spades reaches back to Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and even Stanley Kubrick; this is a film in which nearly every image looks worked over and carefully polished, with no detail left unconsidered.

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.

Selah And The Spades showcases Simone’s star power and suggests a promising future for Poe, but ultimately fails to keep up the pace needed to make it the slick, cutting teen drama that it clearly wants to be.

The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.