Sinister
(USA, 110 min.)
Dir. Scott Derrickson, Writ. Scott Derrickson, C. Robert
Cargill
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, Clare Foley, Michael
Hall D’Addario , James Ransone, Vincent D’Onofrio, Fred Dalton Thompson.
Sinister marks the
second entry in the Hid Your Kids! Hide
Your Wife! programme for the 2012 Ethan Hawke Film Festival. Hawke first
played a tormented novelist in The Woman in the Fifth, which saw him
terrorized by the turtlenecked diva played by Kristin Scott Thomas. Hawke now
plays a tormented writer in Sinister,
which sees him terrorized by the Boogieman and some ugly kids in bad make-up.
The man has been typecast, but not for the worse since he’s in top form here.
The murder of the four family members remains an unsettling
mystery. Their third child, Stephanie, disappeared at the time of the murders
and she has not been seen since. The case remains unsolved, which provides a
juicy story for Hawke’s cardigan clad author, Ellison Osborne, a true crime
novelist who moves his family into the town so he can immerse himself in the
story. Ellison takes the true crime creepiness to the next level, however, by
moving his family into the same house in which his subjects lived. Unbeknownst
to his wife, the Osborne kids are playing under the same tree that held its
previous owners like piñatas.
Ellison’s research then takes an exciting turn. He stumbles
upon a carton of film reels whilst moving boxes into the attic. Thrilled at the
chance to see some contextual footage of his ghosts, Ellison turns on the Super
8 projector and goes through the archive. The first reel is a bit of a doozy:
it’s a family movie of a happy picnic under the sun, but it then cuts to the
same footage that opens the film. Both fascinated and horrified, Ellison
realizes the golden opportunity this film offers a true crime writer: first
hand footage of the crime presumably shot by the killer himself. Intrigued by
the offering, Ellison moves through the box and watches the home movies. One
reel after another show roughly the same thing: a normal ordinary family, much
like his, meets a grisly death through the lens of the Super 8 camera. There’s
even a familial death at the hands of a runaway lawnmower. M. Night Shyamalan,
eat your heart out.
The reels of Super 8 footage allow Sinister to make an interesting play on old staples of the horror
genre. Sinister does something new by
splicing the stale formula of the found footage film with the creepy convention
of the killer cam. The result is surprisingly good. By taking the archival
image as a point-of-view shot of the killer rather than as a shaky handheld
image shot by a third party, Sinister
confront the viewer’s fascination with grisly shock value and perverted
violence. The result is mostly unpredictable, unlike most found footage films
that signal their endpoint in their opening scene.
The scary bits come once Ellison makes a crucial discovery
in the footage (if the gruesome murders of families/children aren’t creepy
enough). Each reel contains a fleeting image of the same man – a demonic
disfigured man who watches the murders from the sidelines. Someone else is
clearly holding the camera, however, and performing the killings, so these
murders – to the mind of a writer – hold a pattern of the occult.
Sinister has the
makings for a great cold case film, but something gets muddled along the way
when it adds a haunted house approach. There are almost too many angles at play
in the film – one can only imagine what someone like David Fincher might have
done with it – but Sinister favours
the horror genre above the suspense/thriller and it will certainly satisfy fans
who like things that go bump in the night. Brought to the screen by the
producers of Insidious and Paranormal Activity, Sinister has a creepy atmosphere and
moments of genuine terror. It’s too bad that much of the horror relies on
pop-out surprises and a cheesy sound design (this is a film that includes many
noises coming from the attic), although the use of the film projector as an
aural cue for peril is pretty eerie.
The scariest stuff in Sinister,
actually, is its play with the film image. Whereas some horror movies feature
slow walking knife wielders who escape from the loony bin or arise from the
lake, Sinister scares the audience
with a villain that exists primarily within the mind of his victims. Mr. Boogie
survives a bit like how Freddie lives in the nightmares of young folks: he resides
in the image and once someone sees him, his presence is forever burned in his/her
mind. This premise of Sinister will
rattle moviegoers who like to scream in their seats, for Mr. Boogie sticks to
you for life once one sees him. Sinister’s
play with the afterimage is smart and scary since the most unsettling horror
films are those that haunt the mind once the film is over. By combining the
terror with the film form itself, Sinister
is Halloween treat for movie buffs.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Sinister opens in theatres October 12 for Alliance Films.
