Lovie Simone appears in Selah and the Spades by Tayaresha Poe, an official selection of the NEXT program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Jomo Fray

Selah and the Spades is the type of movie that immediately drops you into its world. Through Tayarisha Poe’s clear, confident vision, high school cliques become mafia clans vying for power and order in a posh boarding school setting. Like Lord of the Flies, adults are few and far between—this is a world led and controlled by these high schoolers, and when adults do appear, they’re ineffectual and preachy.

In a brief, stylish introduction, the movie teaches us about the factions that provide structure to the elite Pennsylvania boarding school setting. With names like “the Prefects” or “the Bobbies,” it’s a clever twist on the traditional high school cliques rigorously documented in other high school movies like Mean Girls or Clueless. Each faction has a particular role to fulfill, all in service of maintaining the lifestyles and social order that the student body is accustomed to. The Spades, led by the titular and savage Selah, provide the “party favors” for their classmates. This can be anything from Adderall for studying to 8 balls and alcohol. When senior Selah must pick a replacement leader for her faction, she becomes mentor to new girl Paloma, a relationship that reopens old wounds and destabilizes the uneasy symbiosis between the factions.

Although Selah and the Spades’ story does evoke other classics in the high school genre, particularly Heathers and Cruel Intentions, it’s more similar in style and character to Dear White People and Brick in that it uses hyper-stylized filmmaking to match the dizzying emotional highs that come with the throes of adolescence. Yet writer-director Tayarisha Poe takes a naturalist, near brutal approach that reveals that the story unfolding on screen is more akin to The Godfather than anything. Selah, and her steely portrayal by Lovie Simone, likewise resembles Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone after his bloody baptism—she is ruthless and savage, incapable of the type of introspection that might cause her to realize that her motives are less righteous and more self-serving. 

Languid in pacing, the movie does sometimes drag or confuse under the weight of its hyper-stylization, particularly when it’s paired with sometimes disorderly editing and storytelling. When the filmmaking synchronizes, though– and it often does– uncertain discord hits in a way as a piece of haunting, atonal music would. As a work of art, the movie, like Selah, is a mystery that builds to something gloomy and near apocalyptic as the extent of Selah’s savagery and control is revealed. Similarly, the rigid social structure hides a chaotic underbelly, full of folks vying for an unwieldy sense of “power” in their own human, predictable ways. This message is both stunning in its impact in the moment and eternal, like a fable.

Tayarisha Poe’s vision and storytelling are entirely the stars of Selah and the Spades. It is quite a remarkable debut, confident and original, and Poe is a filmmaker that we should rightly hear more from. This is a movie that beguiles and imprints on you—a dream or a nightmare that Poe shares with the viewer. In this Lynchian way, the movie doesn’t so much resolve as much as it fitfully leaves, thrusting you back awake, left to unravel the enigmatic message it leaves behind.

Selah and the Spades
2020
dir Tayarisha Poe
97 min.

Now streaming on Amazon Prime

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