Cassadaga (2011)

Actress Kelen Coleman stars in this strange but entertaining little film as a young, deaf, art teacher called Lily. At the start of the film we see a boy in a dress playing with a puppet doll. He is interrupted when his mother bursts in raging and shouting, she stamps on the doll and makes him take off the dress, which she then cuts up. After she leaves the boy picks up one half of the broken scissors and he enters the kitchen while his mother's back is turned. I think he probably kills her judging by the scream.
The other backstory is that Lily and her sister were brought up by a single parent mother who unfortunately died whilst they were young. She is looking after her sister who we understand is not having such a great time at High School and has been saving up to move them both to Paris. Unfortunately before this happens, her sister is tragically killed when she is hit by a car as she runs across a road not looking and thinking only of the Paris trip.
Lily leaves her job and moves to a place where her mother went to college called Cassadaga. Now, I'm a little murky on whether Cassadaga is a hotel, a university or a village. Lily stays with someone who I think used to be her mother's college tutor. The tutor has a grandson who seems to be a violent young man who keeps himself locked in an upstairs room where he watches violent pornography. It's not clear whether this man and the boy in the first sequence are the same but that was my interpretation.
In rebuilding her life, Lily meets a paramedic via his daughter who is being taught by Lily. The relationship blossoms and they start dating. On one of their first dates they are in a bar discussing the paranormal and the other couple they are with are having an argument about the scientific truth of the paranormal. To try and settle the argument, they decide to visit a spiritualist. Initially turned away until Lily offers to pay $500 for the session on everyone's behalf. They get in. What unfolds is that during the séance Lily is speaking to her sister but another spirit invades and attacks Lily. Lily is attacked several more times by this spirit and each time is shown images that don't make sense. During the course of these attacks, the paramedic boyfriend tries to help. However, he is in a custody battle for his daughter and, when during one of these spirit attacks, his daughter is present - he is forced by his ex-wife to close the relationship. Torn between his daughter and his love interest, he chooses his daughter - unfortunately for Lily! Interspersed with the spirit attacks we see sequences where a man dressed in an apron and wearing a welding mask amputates a woman and strings her up like a marionette with her severed arms and legs re-attached with articulated metal joints.
I won't give any more of the plot away but there is enough in here to know that the film weaves all these different story elements together quite well.
This was quite a decent film in my opinion. Some scary elements, some thrills and some good special effects. The final sequences reveal all and the suspense is kept up quite well. I liked the character Lily, the decision for her to be deaf was a strange one, I wasn't entirely convinced it was portrayed as realistically as it could have been - this was the element I didn't enjoy as much as the suspense. Overall though, I can fairly easily recommend this film to horror and suspense fans.