Who Bullies the Bullies?

The ScreamWhat started as a meta-commentary on slasher media became just another slasher series in its own right, the Scream series then reinvented itself as a meta-commentary on meta-commentary. series weighs heavily over any modern slasher. That series, which started in 1996 (so it’s effectively not even modern anymore, being closer to the slasher boom of the early 1980s than it is to the current theatrical slate) was a meta commentary on slashers, and it feels like every work in the genre that’s come since has effectively had to be an answer to Scream. They’re all populated by quippy kids that somehow realize they’re in a kind of slasher (even if they never actually say the words out loud) fighting against a masked killer that is, somehow, related to them. Scream set the formula and now every slasher has to play into it.

Sometimes it works well. Most of the time, though, the films that come along feel derivative, even when they try to add more to the film to make themselves stand out. I like films like Totally Killer and the Fear Street movies, and I think the twists they add to the slasher concept (time travel and a three-part legacy of horror, respectively) do help to elevate their films somewhat. But they still feel like they’re acting as an answer to Scream and not an original work really trying to find their own voice.

And then you come to Departing Seniors, a slasher that seems to say, “hey, what if Scream, only less meta but with more psychic powers.” The cast feels like they could have walked right off the set of Scream V, and the writing feels just as quippy, trying to be smart and sassy when, half the time, it really just seems strained and overwrought. It’s not that Departing Seniors is a bad film, it just doesn’t do enough to actually set itself apart from the slasher genre, acting more like just another bit of theatrical fodder that will soon get cast aside.

The 2023 film focuses on Javier (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), a gay high school student who has to deal with a few bullies that just won’t leave him alone. After a feisty back and forth with his attackers – one of whom, Brad (Sasha Kuznetsov), is also secretly Javier’s lover – leads to them chasing Javier through the hall, Javier takes a tumble on some stairs, knocks his head, and ends up in the hospital. After he wakes up he discovers he has psychic powers, something that a crazy aunt of his had as well, and apparently the concussion unlocked the powers for him.

This strange, new gift comes with a downside, though. As it turns out, there’s a killer stalking the halls of the high school, taking out the various cool, popular people, the same ones that have been bullying kids like Javier all semester long. One kid died a couple of months back, seemingly killing themselves in the school pool after hours. But when Javier gets a vision of Brad dying, which then actually happens, he begins to suspect that both seeming suicides were murders, and that means someone he knows, someone in the high school, is the killer.

To be blunt, Departing Seniors strains to make all its story threads work. There’s a lot going on in the film, from Javier’s relationship to Brad, a new, budding romance with a different boy, William (Ryan Foreman), his rivalry with teen queen bee Ginny (Maisie Merlock), and his psychic powers, and not all of it really feels as well developed as it should. The love triangle he has with Brad and William, for instance, should be a bigger part of the plot than it is. How did Javier end up falling for Brad, and why did the bully reciprocate? This is a major storyline that would color both Brad and Javier as characters, but we only get to see the aftermath, not what led up to their tryst(s).

The psychic powers, also, feel really tacked on. They aren’t there to add to the story, instead seemingly existing simply so the plot could move forward. Havier touches someone, has a vision, and then realizes someone is about to die. Instead of that, we could have the same effect by Javier getting a weird text, or being in part of the school and hearing a weird noise. The psychic powers are meant to distinguish Javier from other slasher heroes and heroines of the genre, giving him something special to set him apart, but it’s a tacked-on differentiator that adds nothing to his character or story.

All of the threads are left dangling, with none of them really getting much in the way of development. But coming in at the end of the affair between Javier and Brad we don’t really get to understand Brad as a character before he dies. I get that it’s meant to make him more of a person in our eyes, but he’s barely in the film and feels like fodder when he’s bumped off. The other threads are meant to give us context for characters that maybe could be the killer, but, again, they’re all so underdeveloped that we don’t really care who the killer is. There isn’t enough there to get invested. Even with the film keeping the cast small it tries to do too much and ends up not doing anything very well.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the reveal of the killer (which I won’t spoil). Suffice it to say that it’s yet another underdeveloped character, but they’re also, effectively, the only character left who could actually be the bad guy. It’s easy to guess early on who it might be, and then as other characters are eliminated your suspicions are more than justified. In the end, when the reveal happens, even the film realizes it hasn’t done enough work to justify its own twist, so it stops dead to let the killer explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. This kills all narrative momentum for the film, which is even more shocking when it’s also supposed to be the killer, action-packed climax for the film as well. It really feels like the film gives up at this point and tries to limp to the ending as quickly as it can.

And through it all, the film just can’t find itself. Sometimes it’s jokey, sometimes it’s dramatic, but it careens back and forth between tones without really finding itself properly. It wants to be Scream, but also I Know What You Did Last Summer, with maybe a little bit of Carrie thrown in as well, but those are tonally very different films that don’t mash well together. Departing Seniors tries, though, and then fails hard every time it wildly shifts tone for the next scene. It never settles in on one idea, and feels far weaker because of it.

The only reason the film works at all is because the cast is game and interesting. For a low-budget, cheap-seats slasher, Departing Seniors has a cast far better than the C-grade CW stars you would expect. They help to elevate the characters and the story, and they make Departing Seniors better than it has any right to be. With a less successful cast this film would be a total failure. As it stands, I liked the cast enough to hang around with them even when I found the film tedious and their story preposterous.

I didn’t hate Departing Seniors, but I didn’t really like it either. It’s an aggressively average movie that desperately wanted to be something more. And through it all I couldn’t help but think, time and again, “I really wish these characters were in a better slasher. Like Scream.” That meta-slasher still holds up all these years later, while Departing Seniors will quickly fade from your memory soon after the credits have rolled on its characters.