Sinister: Good acting, but wait for the DVD

The first in a series of films to be released from the hor­ror genre this sea­son is “Sin­is­ter.” It fol­lows the story of true-crime nov­el­ist, Elli­son Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) as he moves his fam­ily from town to town in search of his next big book idea. Each time he moves his fam­ily, they grow more despon­dent and agi­tated with their seem­ingly nomadic lifestyle. This causes a great amount of fric­tion in Oswalt’s mar­riage. It also seems to be the root of his son’s night ter­rors and his daughter’s com­pelling need to expres­sively paint on her walls.

The story really takes off as, Oswalt is plac­ing boxes in the attic of the new house and dis­cov­ers a box labeled “Home Movies” which con­tains a super 8mm pro­jec­tor and sev­eral film can­is­ters labeled with their own clever titles. Oswalt sees his fam­ily to bed and stays up to get a jump start on his next novel inves­ti­gat­ing the crimes that occurred in the new town of his res­i­dence. He decides to set up the pro­jec­tor and take a glimpse of the most recent reel in the series. The film turns out to be an actual film of the mur­der in which he is bas­ing his cur­rent crime novel. The inner con­flict eats away at him as he strug­gles with the choice of turn­ing this over to the police or hold­ing on to them and hav­ing the inside scoop on what could turn into a best seller.

I am an avid hor­ror film junkie as well as a huge fan of Hawke. I have admired his work ever since he was that kid that built the space­ship out of a tilt-a-whirl in “Explor­ers” (look it up, kids). Hawke deliv­ers some of his best work in “Sin­is­ter” as he strug­gles with fam­ily prob­lems, drink­ing and the appari­tions that haunt him through­out the movie. He plays the believ­able role of a per­son who is begin­ning to ques­tion their own real­ity while every­thing he knows is revoked and sub­sti­tuted with a para­nor­mal real­ity. “Sin­is­ter” is almost a one-man show and right­fully so. The sup­port­ing cast is fairly con­vinc­ing as well; right down to the bum­bling local “Bar­ney Fife-like” cop that feeds him infor­ma­tion to fuel his novel.

While the act­ing in this film was great, the story could have been told in an hour in a made-for-tv movie. I felt that it was a lit­tle pre­dictable as the direc­tor fed the audi­ence too many clues in a short amount of time. My first instinct was cor­rect and I had drawn a con­clu­sion that ended up to be the exact sce­nario that was revealed in the final moments of the movie. As I men­tioned ear­lier though, I am an avid hor­ror fan and per­haps had a leg up on this sort of thing. My over­all opin­ion of this is to wait for the DVD release. I have a feel­ing that we have not yet seen this year’s great hor­ror movie. If you want to see last year’s, rent “Cabin in the Woods.” It is one of the most refresh­ing takes on hor­ror films that I have seen in many years. If you are inter­ested in real “true crime” nov­els, I sug­gest Amy: My Search for Her Killer by nov­el­ist and Ohio native James Renner.

Show­times for Fri­day at Rave Motion Pic­tures Polaris 18, 1071 Gem­ini Place: 10:35 a.m., 12:10 p.m., 1:15 p.m., 2:45 p.m., 4 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 6:45 p.m., 8:15 p.m., 9:45 p.m. and 10:50 p.m.

Posted by Scott Hall on Oct 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.