Movie Review - Sinister

Sinister (2012)

Starring Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, James Ransone, Michael Hall D'Addario, Clare Foley, and Vincent D'Onofrio

Directed by Scott Derrickson

It's not often that I come out of a movie and wonder why in the world it needed to be made.  I'm aware that even the really bad ones have an audience.  Sinister isn't even bad...in fact, it's fairly effective in that it made me uncomfortable quite often which is typically a goal of horror movies.  However, there's an overarching air of unease here that negates the "fun" one often associates with the adrenaline rush of scary movies.  Still, I have to give the film credit because although I may never want to see it again, it successfully told an incredibly disquieting tale.

One would think based off my description above that Sinister falls into the realm of "torture porn," but that's not necessarily the case.  Instead, it's a regular horror flick mixed with a bit of the ever-so-popular "found footage" genre, the latter of which is the cause for most of my distress over the film.  The story revolves around Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a popular true crime author who moves his wife and two kids into a new home in order to research his new book revolving around the unsolved murders of a family of four who were hung from a tree in their back yard a few months prior.  What Ellison fails to tell his wife, son, and daughter is that he's moved them into the very house where the murders took place.  Upon unpacking, Ellison goes up to the attic and finds a box of old Super 8 movies and a projector.  Curious to see if the films involve the home's previous owners, Ellison begins to watch the movies, but discovers that each reel shows the murder of a family in heinous ways. Ranging in dates from the 1960s all the way up to the 2011 hanging murders that occurred in what is now his backyard, Ellison begins to work on discovering the connection between all these crimes.

My qualms with the film are difficult to explain, but I'll attempt to here.  When you watch most horror movies, there's ideally a nervous tension that sets in despite the fact that most of what you watch isn't really in the realm of possibility.  In Sinister, the videos of the murders depicted simply felt too much like actual snuff films.  I sat there watching the movie thinking that someone could duplicate what was seen and that's what made me tense -- not necessarily the actions of the movie itself.  I realize fully that this is irrational and in many eyes this would deem the flick a success.  Filmmaker Scott Derrickson created something so believable that it made me nervous...and kudos to him for that.  He's just made something that I never wish to see again and that, quite frankly, I'm not sure needed to be filmed in the first place.

[I fully realize the above paragraph makes very little sense, but I've yet to pinpoint an adequate explanation for my issues with the film.]

Despite this completely irrational issue (hey, at least I recognize when I'm being a fool), Sinister proves to be a solidly crafted horror movie with a decent performance from Ethan Hawke as writer Ellison Oswalt who slowly finds himself being completely caught up in the horrors he's witnessing from the horrific home videos.  Sinister is successful in most aspects, but it made me uncomfortable and the fact that it wasn't enjoyable to watch is what knocks this down a few notches despite its recognizable quality of mastering several techniques of the horror genre.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-