In short: Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite

Original title: Pikovaya dama. Chyornyy obryad

A group of Russian kids of surprisingly mixed ages play around with a mirror based ritual somewhat akin to good old Bloody Mary, conjuring up an entity known as the Queen of Spades. The Queen of Spades is a shorn-haired spectre with a nasty disposition and the habit of cutting a lock of hair from her victim of the moment as a sort of bad luck foreplay, and consequently, the mortality rate among the kids rises dramatically.

Eventually, the father of Anna (Alina Babak), the youngest of the kids, becomes involved, slowly starting to believe his daughter’s strange story, and doing his best to protect her and the other survivors.

PG-13-style horror movies are alive and well and apparently being made in Russia too, for director Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s Queen of Spades belongs to that part of the horror realm to the core, with all the problems that brings with it. The film’s main problem, and really a problem nearly all movies of this horror bracket suffer under, is a certain harmlessness even a handful of dead teens can’t hide, where nothing is ever allowed to have full emotional impact on audience or characters. There’s a heavy reliance on formula visible, with only very little attempt to do something terribly interesting with said formula and also disappointingly little about the film’s monster that seem culturally specific. The Queen of Spades could be directly transplanted into an American horror movie without any changes or cultural translation necessary, making the film’s central villain a bit more generic than you’d hope for.

However, while Podgaevskiy doesn’t move from the teen horror formula one iota, he does realize that formula more than just a little competently, with a series of perfectly competent and reasonably effective horror scenes – not all of them jump scare based – packaged into a well-paced movie.

It is most certainly a slick looking little film, the director really squeezing his budget – which did probably make Blumhouse look like Marvel - for all it is visually worth.


So Queen of Spades may not be a terribly exciting proposition if you’ve sat through a lot of films of its style, but I can’t honestly pretend it is not a well-made film.