A box of home movies thrusts a true crime writer and his family into the path of supernatural evil in Sinister from director Scott Derrickson. Derrickson you may remember as the director of Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Ethan Hawke stars as Ellison Oswalt, a down on his luck writer looking for his first best seller in ten years. He moves his family to a new town and a new home where grisly murders took place. He doesn’t tell his wife or kids though...but they learn about it at school anyways, and his wife is pissed!!!
Written by Derrickson and first timer C Robert Cargill it is really a story of a man neglecting his family for the sake of his career. Instead it felt like an exercise in how many times can we make a guy go look for a noise in the dark with nothing but a flashlight or a baseball bat.
The acting definitely helped propel the narrative with good performances by Hawke and Juliet Rylance, the actress who plays the wife. As they discuss their marriage we feel like a fly on the wall that has heard this conversation a dozen times before. This leads us to a method we have seen a dozen times before: found footage. The format is used decently here, both in the home movies and his personal VHS tapes which seem to conjure up his own personal ghosts and disappointment.
We get good performances from the children, a standout performance by James Ransome as deputy So and So and a “cameo” by Vincent D’Onofrio. He plays a professor from the local college who specializes in the occult. Creepy kid, new home, child abducting maniac, occult expert...heard this before? Yeah, it’s called Insidious.
I found the sound design to be exceptional and there is a great scene with a lawnmower, but it doesn’t make up for the tired story line or the terrible ghost make-up. Sinister is rated R for disturbing violent images and some terror, it has a run time of 110 minutes and it gets a 1 1/2 out of five stars on the gore score. The film is worth one watch for the gruesome kill scenes.
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