Movie review: Sinister

Should you give your horror movie a title as forbidding as Sinister, then you better not be light on with the heavy stuff.

ethan hawke sinister

MOVIE REVIEW: Should you give your horror movie a title as forbidding as Sinister, then you better not be light on with the heavy stuff.

Therefore the makers of this deceptively unsettling spooker are quite within their rights to play their trump card early and often.

The recurring keynote chill of Sinister is released in the first frames of the picture proper. A silent, Super-8 home movie is playing.

Four members of an ordinary suburban family are dangling from a tree. Hoods over their heads. Nooses around their necks.

One branch of the tree slowly droops to the ground. At the same time, another branch is slowly raised skywards. The dangling is over. The execution is complete.

Years later, a true-crime writer named Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) moves his family to the same house where this terrible incident occurred.

It has been a decade since any of Oswalt's books have sold in decent numbers. The guy is desperate for a hit. Hence the trashy, splashy change of address.

Our hero might also have thought to tell his wife why their new residence was so cheap. But she has already told him that if the next book is a bust, she's taking the kids and leaving.

Not that Ellison would even notice once he becomes obsessed with a box he finds in the attic. Its contents? Forty years of an unknown serial killer's greatest hits, all snuffily preserved for posterity by the mystery man himself.

Though not without its flat spots, there is enough uneasy business being conducted here to give those so inclined a moderate case of the creeps.

--

Sinister [MA15+]

Rating: 3/5

Director: Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism Of Emily Rose)

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, Fred Dalton Thompson, James Ransone

"Look, look away, look again"