Review #345: Solstice (2008)


October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #18 - Solstice (2008)

Watch it here on Amazon Prime Video!

Solstice follows a girl named Megan, as she and her friends go on a trip out to her family's summer home in the swamps of Louisiana a few months after Megan's twin sister, Sophie, committed suicide at a party. While on this trip, Megan starts seeing and hearing strange things- objects moved, lights turned on, shadowy figures lurking in the distance- and she begins to think that her dead sister is trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave. With some help from a local man with some experience in the occult, they delve into the mysteries of the unknown- and they find out that there's much more going on than just Sophie's death...

Solstice was a pretty interesting film- on one hand it's an exploration of dealing with the loss of a close loved one, and the guilt that inevitably comes from that sort of grief. You start to blame yourself even when there's obviously nothing you could have done, you start drawing connections where there really are none, and you start looking for help anywhere you can find it, even when it's in the back of a sketchy magazine about cryptids and urban legends. But as the movie goes on, and Megan finds out more of what was going on surrounding her sister's death, this becomes much more than that- I honestly might have been on board if it was just a story where Megan learns to cope with the loss of her sister, but I really liked how it ended up being intertwined with the creepy guy living on the other side of the lake, and the mysterious keychain that keeps turning up no matter where Megan puts it. This film has a significant twist that gets revealed right near the end, and while I saw part of it coming (just due to genre savviness and certain actors' typecasting) there were definitely parts of it that took me by surprise, and it really elevated the movie above what it would have been otherwise. (Though I do wonder what this could have been if it turned out there was no supernatural element to the story whatsoever.)

I don't really have a ton else to say about this one; it's a pretty solid film that went completely under my radar. All of the performances are solid, the casting was great, and there's not a huge reliance on jump scares or special effects- it's just good writing and good production. Apparently this is mostly a remake of a Danish movie from 2003 called Midsommer; I might watch that one in my free time to see how it compares.

Give this one a watch, if you have a chance!

Overall Rating: 8/10 Watery Seances

Change of Plans: Apparently this movie was set to film in Louisiana in 2005, but the onset of Hurricane Katrina caused them to completely scrap their plans as they stood. The entire film had to be recast, and filmed a whole year later!

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