NAMA : Inda Nirmalasari
KELAS : a 4.1
NPM : 12 23 032
Horor Movie
"Sinister" is a story made of darkness: mysterious
loud bangs in the attic, distant moans from the dead, vulnerable children, an
egomaniac crime writer and his long-suffering wife, who is plenty fed up even
before she discovers he has moved his family into the same house where
horrifying murders took place.
The movie opens with four people standing with nooses around
their necks and hoods over their heads. From above the frame, a power saw cuts
off a tree limb. As it falls, its weight hangs the victims. Soon after Ellison
Oswalt and wife Tracy (Ethan Hawke
and Juliet Rylance)
move into a spacious suburban house, we can see through the kitchen window that
the hanging tree, with a distinctive split branch, is in the backyard.
What kind of a psycho would move his family into this house?
Even the unfriendly sheriff tells him it's in "very poor taste." But
the house was priced to sell. Almost immediately Ellison discovers it was no
bargain. In the attic, he finds a box labeled "Home Movies,"
containing reels of Super-8 film and a projector to exhibit them.
"Sinister" is an undeniably scary movie, with
performances adding enough human interest to give depth to the basic building
blocks of horror. Ethan Hawke plays an introverted, driven man who wrote a best-selling,
true-crime book some years ago and is convinced a book about those ghastly
hangings will be another success — especially since one member of the doomed
family is still missing.
His wife shares the misgivings of her children about being
uprooted from their former home and being moved to an isolated house in the
woods. Her distress grows as Ellison locks himself in his office, and grows
distant and distracted. Their children, Trevor and Ashley (Michael Hall
D'Addario and Clare Foley), begin to have night terrors and episodes of
sleepwalking. Although Tracy remains ignorant of the house's true history, the
kids discover it soon enough through playground tauntings. Ashley, who has been
given one wall of her room to paint on, begins to summon disturbing images.
The film, directed by Scott Derrickson
("The Exorcism of
Emily Rose"), focuses on Ellison, who spends
much time scrutinizing the 8mm movies, which disturbingly show the murders of
other families. He transfers them to his laptop, and his stop-action analysis
uncovers almost hidden details. Some shots cause him to recoil in terror. He
begins to hit the bottle. His wife grows hostile.
Almost all of the action occurs at night. Wouldn't you know
for part of the time the power is off in their neighborhood? (The outage
doesn't seem to affect the porch lights.) Even when the power seems to be
working, Ellison for no reason prefers to creep around the house and climb into
the attic carrying a small flashlight, which serves only to make him a target
to anything that might be waiting in the dark. I was strongly reminded of Ellen Burstyn
creeping into her attic in "The Exorcist,"
holding only a candle. All through "Sinister," you keep thinking,
"Switch on the lights, fool!"
Three supporting characters are effective. Fred Dalton
Thompson is the sheriff, whose initial hostility later seems only
reasonable. James Ransone
is his deputy, a crime buff who is star-struck by the famous writer and signs
on as a volunteer researcher. (He dreams of being cited in the eventual book:
"You know, like thanks to Deputy So-and-So, without whose invaluable help…").
And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio,
as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line
of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes,
the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I
don't.
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