Review: Selah and the Spades Is a Paean to the Struggle to Be Seen

The film locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.

Selah and the Spades

At Haldwell, the boarding school at the center of Selah and the Spades, students are part of factions. But as the opening narration clarifies, and with the aid of illustrated portraits mounted on easels, these factions aren’t your usual high school cliques. Haldwell is a veritable high school underworld, where the right faction provides access to parties, drugs, test answers, and more in total, unified secrecy. The teens are organized, down to the smallest, most innocuous details. They’ve signed a treaty, and they’ve got a moderator at their table meeting in the woods, where they debate what to do for the senior prank.

Writer-director Tayarisha Poe resists spinning this story into comedic pastiche, or treating it with a similar genre-aware remove as Rian Johnson’s high school-set neo-noir Brick. Instead, she crafts a character piece centered on faction leader Selah (Lovie Simone) that smoothly incorporates the stranger, more heighted elements of her world to portray not just how teens see themselves, but especially how they allow themselves to be seen.

With her right-hand man, Maxxie (Jharrel Jerome), Selah and her faction run drugs, keeping them in a chest while neatly logging transactions in an omnipresent ledger. But because Selah a senior, and her time at Haldwell is almost up, she’s on the lookout for a successor, which draws her to the artsy newcomer she spots photographing the school’s “spirit squad”: Paloma (Celeste O’Connor). As Poe cuts between shots of the two girls, their eyelines don’t match but they overlap in the frame, signifying the potential for succession while emphasizing their differences at the same time. They match up, but not completely.

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Selah and the Spades is full of such confident formal touches. Poe and cinematographer Jomo Fray constantly find creative angles and use for negative space, alternating between depictions of the mannered control that Selah exhibits and the more free-wheeling handheld that corresponds with Paloma. Poe’s screenplay exhibits a similar consideration, depicting what it’s like for Selah to move through this world: young, black, female, perhaps asexual, and pressured from every direction. The film examines what it means for Selah to be who she is, and how it reflects in her work and makes her good at her job. She’s skeptical yet totally composed, intent on creating opposition because that’s how she functions best, against an adversary. When she says “friend,” you sense that she also means “business relationship.”

Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image. When first talking to Paloma, Selah gives a speech as if into the camera about the purpose of the spirit squad and having their own agency. What at first feels a little didactic slyly becomes a reflection of the speaker herself, revealing a practiced quality to her presentation. Selah addresses the camera because she’s all too familiar with that self-awareness of being seen, of working to be seen a certain way. She knows that to maintain control, she must be seen asserting it.

Score: 
 Cast: Lovie Simon, Celeste O’Connor, Jharrel Jerome, Ana Mulvoy-Ten, Gina Torres, Jesse Williams  Director: Tayarisha Poe  Screenwriter: Tayarisha Poe  Distributor: Amazon Studios  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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