Sinister (2012) - Derrickson's genuinly unpleasant horror

♥♥♥♥

 

+ Best Mega-Hit Movie of the Year

 

The poster for Scott Derrickson's Sinister effectively conveys some of the film's horrors

 

A true-crime writer and his strained family move to a new town for his work, but the man, who desperately needs to write another hit after years of flops, has neglected to inform his family members that this time, they are moving into the crime scene. 

Ethan Hawke (Boyhood (2014)) treads intensely into his character's shoes here to a fantastic degree. Juliet Rylance (The Knick (2014-15)) is also good as the wife and mother, and the two share a couple of passionate, very credible fights in Sinister.

We follow Hawke's work with a substantial amount of very troubling material, which he finds in the house. Sinister features phenomenal sound work and a droning, unpleasantness-creating score by Christopher Young (Spider-Man 3 (2007)). It is not a 'fun' ride type of horror, - as The Conjuring (2013), for instance, - but a deeply discomforting horror movie about family slayings and child abductions.

The third act fails to live up to the promises of the first two and disappoints a bit, but the film up until this has been so well-made and intensely scary that this doesn't rock the fact that Sinister is a good horror. It is written by C. Robert Cargill (Doctor Strange (2016)) and co-writer/director Scott Derrickson (Deliver Us from Evil (2014)).

Related posts:

Scott Derrickson: 2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V] 

2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]

2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) - Unduly bashed sci-fi drama

From Young's score for the film, here is the track entitled Don't Go in Dad's Office

Cost: 3 mil. $

Box office: 77.7 mil. $

= Mega-hit

[Sinister premiered March 11 (Austin, Texas' SXSW festival) and runs 110 minutes. Cargill got the idea for the film from a nightmare he had following watching The Ring, and it was originally meant to have a Willy Wonka-inspired boogeyman character in it. The demonic face now seen on the poster and in the film is based on an image from Flickr that Derrickson found and purchased the rights for for 500 $. Filming took place in LA, New York and Long Island from September - October 2011. The film opened #3, behind Taken 2 and Argo, to an 18 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it dropped from the top 5 in its second week and grossed 48 mil. $ (61.8 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 10.6 mil. $ (13.6 %) and France with 3.2 mil. $ (4.1 %). A commercially and critically less successful sequel, not by Derrickson, was released in 2015. Sinister is fresh at 63 % with a 6.2 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Sinister?