Review: ‘The Sacrament’ 8.31.14

Poor Ti West. For a Writer/Director who’s career showed such early promise with his groundbreaking theatrical debut (he had only made a couple of really small indies prior) – 2009’s ‘The House of the Devil’, one of my top 10-20 films of the past 5 years. Also one in which I showered its praises. I told everybody you had to see this movie because it drew comparisons to some of the great masters of suspense like Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. This was one of those filmmaking “wunderkinds”, similar to someone like M. Night Shyamalan and ‘The Sixth Sense’, who’s career also started off young and with a bang. And like Shyamalan, every subsequent film he’s put out since then has been considerably worse than its predessesor. West’s 2011’s – ‘The Innkeepers’ was more or less just a rehashing of ideas from ‘The House of the Devil’ both in style and in content. However, whereas ‘The House of the Devil’ was a master class in both wracking suspense and creating a sense of foreboding dread. ‘The Inkeepers’ fell kind of flat with me. I thought the premise of a seemingly haunted hotel with 2 leftover clerks during its final days of closing was shmaltzy and just another excuse for West to cook up another one of his trademark “slo-burners” by roaming his camera around the hotel’s empty rooms and corridors, similar to ‘The House of the Devil’, but in an exercise that I found to be much less effective. Even still, the chills did surmount and their was a fair amount of suspense built up throughout. Just not enough and the ending felt slightly anticlimactic.

Here West is essentially recreating the events of the Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. A religious group who Jones, because of his opposing viewpoints with America’s opressive ways of living, moved his followers down to South America to create their own Utopia, or what they referred to as “Eden”, in the late seventies. West basically takes this story and spins his own take on it. Presenting it as a fictionalized story when it actuality it couldn’t be more non-fiction. He also shamelessly uses what is becoming overdone specifically with films in this genre, and films it in a POV, hand held, found footage style. Which doesn’t necessarily add anything. If anything it detracts from the story. Why? Because where movies like the ‘Blair Witch Project’ and more recently the ‘VHS’ series actually look like found footage. Nothing here even remotely looks like found footage. In fact, the camera stock comes out looking like there was quite a bit of money put into it. So, sorry Ti but your picture doesn’t resemble anything like that of other films of this type. Furthermore, West also employs his trademark “slo-burning” style once again here. But while it was highly effective in ‘The House of the Devil’ and remotely effective in ‘The Innkeepers’, here it is completely ineffective because we already know how things are going to end (unless of course you are 1% of the population and know nothing about Reverend Jones and Jonestown). That, and when we do finally come to the inevitable ending, West uses shock tactics to show us up close and personal how these people came to their end. Again, nothing effective about this at all whatsoever. For me, when I saw the documentary ‘Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple’ (2006) all I needed to see was the helicopter POV shot of the hundreds of people lying in the field after their demise to really understand how undeniably devastasting this tragic event was. Thank you West, but I don’t need to see people foaming at the mouth or lighting themselves on fire to nail the point home. This was done solely to elicit gasps from the audience which was pointless and unecessary. Why this film was ever even made is beyond me. It’s about as useless as Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot for shot remake of Hitchcock’s beloved ‘Psycho’. Done purely for selfish reasons without even a semblance of having the audience in mind. My best advice for you would be to stay as far from this one as possible.

Grade: D