Sinister is easily the creepiest movie of 2012, a year that did not feature much in terms of great horror movies. It was a movie that I thought I would easily pass on when I first saw the previews. I knew for sure I would not be seeing it in the theater. Ethan Hawke is a good actor who can sometimes be incredible (Training Day, Before Sunset) but also lay some serious duds (Brooklyn’s Finest, The Getaway). Seeing him in a horror film was a change for him and one I didn’t think he would be good at. I’ll be the first to say that I was wrong. He did well in this movie.

I added this to my Netflix queue, and when I received it, I honestly thought I would suffer through it so I could say I saw it. Ironically, the disc stopped working about 2/3 of the way in, and I couldn’t get it working again, no matter how I tried to clean it. So I had to request a new disc and couldn’t finish watching it until a couple of days later. The movie had captured my interest by then. Otherwise, I would have just sent it back and chalked it up as something that wasn’t meant to be. But I was so into it that I wanted to see how it ended. And boy, was I glad that I did. As I said, it’s the creepiest movie of the year. This doesn’t have much to do with Hawke himself, although his reactions to the events he witnesses are very well done. When he gets spooked, we get spooked. He puts his energy into this movie, absorbing himself with his character. But it is director Scott Derrickson (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) who is the real star of this movie.

Hawke plays a non-fiction crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, who has a successful novel called Kentucky Blood to his credit. He’s been living off the fame of this book for an unspecified period while chasing that next great story, but coming up short every time. He has clashed with local authorities in the decade since his breakout novel. We learn that he is a very determined man who doesn’t always have a constructive outlet for himself when things go wrong. He drinks heavily (coffee in the morning, scotch the rest of the day). He has frequent verbal exchanges with his wife, and while he loves his children, he is often an absentee father. With the financial burdens building up, he feels the stress of either telling the next great story or giving up his dream and going back to writing textbooks.

He moves his family of four, which consists of his wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance – Frances Ha), middle-school-aged son Trevor, and elementary school-aged daughter Ashley to a small, quaint town in the northeast where all of the members of a recent family (except for the youngest daughter who is missing) have been murdered. It’s the story that Ellison wants to tell while hedging his bets that this is his next big break. So to assure he is as close to the crime as possible, he moves his family into the house where the gruesome murders took place (the family is found hanging from one of the limbs of a large oak tree in their backyard) but fail to tell his wife and children that this was, in fact, the home where the murders took place.

The star in this movie is not Hawke or anyone else you see parading on screen. Hawke is excellent and probably captures more screen time alone than the other characters combined. Derrickson’s direction steals the show, though. With every creepy VHS tape that keeps resurfacing, we get sucked further and further into the story. The murders we say on shaky handheld cameras are downright scary. And we don’t just see these videos once. We watch them as often as Hawke’s Ellison does as he tries to find clues or figure out if there is any linkage between each video. It’s a tedious and uncomfortable process. The film’s ending will have you thinking about this movie for days. Hawke waited for his whole career to try a horror flick. He picked the right one. Horror fans…this is one to see. Watch it alone in the dark in the middle of the night. Turn off your cell phone. Put your computer away. Bonus if you can watch it while a storm is going on outside.

Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 9/10
Character Chemistry 8/10
Acting 8/10
Screenplay 8.5/10
Directing  9.5/10
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 7.5/10
87.5%

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