Sinister (2012) - Fair or Foul Review

Originally published October 2015

Welcome to our inaugural review of the category that's been in the works for almost a year now: Fair or Foul! This is the review category specifically for movies that skirt the line between good and bad and we weigh the details to determine which side the movie falls on. Today, the somewhat-acclaimed horror film, Sinister.

When Sinister first came out, I recall that it had a strong marketing job. There were a lot of internet banners with the main logo and plenty of screenshots of Ethan Hawke looking at stuff with a worried expression on his face. I read reviews and heard good things about it being another creepy and chilling psychological thriller from the people who did Paranormal Activity and Insidious. I personally didn't think much of either of those films, but they both had their merits. Nonetheless, since Sinister 2 came out this year and I had yet to see the original, it seemed logical to finally watch it.

Unfortunately, this movie was nowhere near as good as people made it out to be. It ended up being the cut-and-dry definition of "Half-Good." So let's break it down with its strengths and weaknesses and see which side of the baseline it ends up on.

Foul: The Premise

The premise of Sinister is that the once-prominent nonfiction author, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), moves into a small town in the northeast with his family to get inspiration / investigate a cold-case crime for his next book. This book is totally going to put him back on the map as a successful author! Sure, because there are just sooooo many people just aching to read those hot nonfiction crime investigation books in between their Harry Potter re-read binge sessions. And wouldn't you know it? The new house that he and his family moved to is, of course, the house of the family that was murdered which Ellison wants to write about.

There are a lot of moments in the film that ask you to just go along with everything. The filmmakers here seemed to have forgotten that unless you write a successful teen-drama series of books or you manage to have some business ties elsewhere via movie deals and multiple blogs, authors don't make JACK SHIT from a best-selling book, let alone from a nonfiction book about crimes that went unsolved. I'm fairly certain that the author of Fast Food Nation is not living in the lavish homes that Ethan Hawke's character managed to afford somehow.

Image: Lionsgate Films | Uh-huh, sure, bro

If you are able to suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself enough that you ignore all the movie tropes or the decisions a normal human being wouldn't rationally make, you might be more scared by the whole ordeal. Since this is a horror movie, and since horror movie characters are dumb by a standard, I guess we're expected to just go along with it.

Nonetheless, I had trouble accepting the logic of the characters and the plot. If you're investigating an unsolved murder case that involves an entire family, would you move your entire family to the house in which that dead family was last known to have been alive? No. You wouldn't unless you're stupid, or uninterested in your family's safety.

I'm not even talking in terms of danger from supernatural crap, or ghost curses. He knows it's THE house in the unsolved murder mystery. Rather than rent out a hotel room or apartment and do his research on his own, he moves his entire family to the murder scene home where the murderer may still be at large. It's not like he couldn't have afforded an extended stay at a Travelodge. They have a massive mansion. They're trying to sell their old mansion so they can live in this much smaller one while he does his research, so his money isn't endless, but moving the family didn't have to be the first and only option. Sinister does show that his dedication to his new book is a higher priority than it should be, but it doesn't take on the tone that he's doing the wrong thing until the supernatural stuff starts to spook him.

Fair: The Investigation

While the premise gets rather thin in parts and there is so much lazy writing involved, the investigation process Ellison is doing is definitely the strongest part of the film. I'm not saying his methods are good, just that what he discovers and how it's presented to him are well done.

While moving into his new home, he discovers a live scorpion and a box of Super 8 home movies in his attic. He quickly finds out that the most recent movie was of the family that lived in the house before him. While seemingly a normal home movie at first, it ends with their grisly murder where four out of the five family members are hanged, with the other child nowhere to be found. This scene happens to be the very first thing we see in the film. It's quiet and graphic without being necessarily gory. As a result, it’s a very unsettling image that is made more ominous by the Super 8 video quality.

Image: Lionsgate Films

Rather than try to show the evidence to the police, like a rational person, he watches the other videos in the box over the course of the film. Naturally, they're all videos of other families who are killed in creative and horrific fashion, indicating that this might all be the work of a serial killer. Each video gets its own spotlight in the movie as though it's a big clue in the mystery, thus a fair amount of attention is paid to each video and whatever Ellison might uncover.

The amount of attention each video gets, the way they're presented, and the fact that they're on the gritty film quality all add to the unsettling nature of the investigation. It starts to work against itself when they use some crappy CGI tricks and suddenly the guitarist from Slipknot starts making his way more and more into the picture, but overall it’s good.

Image: Lionsgate Films | Mick Thomson at the bottom of a pool

Foul: Characters (I'm A Writer!)

If you didn't know that Ethan Hawke's character was an author almost immediately by his cliché writer outfit (gray, unfashionable sweater; disheveled hair; glasses around his neck), don't worry, the movie will do its best to constantly remind you of the fact and further add to the cliché (smokes; drinks whiskey). There are so many camera shots of his successful book and references to his profession, that I wanted to shout: "We get it! He's a writer!"

So much time is spent telling us that he's a writer. There's even a dialogue exchange that questions why he can't do anything else as a day job--a valid conversation one might have with a deadbeat who claims that his work is so important--but rather than showing a realistic outcome of that dialogue, the movie just moves along and says his work is really important, as though justifying his irrational decision to stay in a house that is clearly haunted. Instead of trying to justify his irrational writery writerness, how about some back story on the other characters? Of the 6 other characters in the film, I think each one can be summed up with a single sentence.

We never find out what his wife does for a living, which ends up being a big question considering how worthless Ellison is. His kids are absent for most of the film and only really show up to move the plot along or provide very brief scares. His family, whom I'm assuming we're supposed to care for, is just there when it's convenient. When the inevitable "You moved your family to the murder scene house?!" argument took place, I couldn't even side with the wife because I barely knew her as a character, and the logic that she used was flawed. It didn't matter that it would be the more rational side of the argument, she didn't say anything of value just like the rest of the film.

Image: Lionsgate Films | Help me! I'm trying to escape this script!

Then there's the dopey deputy character channeling his inner David Arquette from Scream. This is an example of an unfinished character. The writers couldn't decide if they wanted him to be inept or intelligent. He's the source of some comedy in the film by being a blundering nervous fan of Ellison, even though he's not supposed to be, because Ellsion tends to make police officers look bad during his investigations. Then there's sort of a point in the film where he's suddenly a lot more useful (because the plot demands it) and his ineptitude goes away.

There are a few other side characters that are injected into the plot for convenience and plot progression, such as the obligatory scientist-person who provides the information on the haunting we wouldn't be able to gather on our own. There's also the obligatory law-enforcement person who "don't take kindly to yada-yada." I'm pretty sure he actually uses that phrase too.

Fair: Atmosphere

Sinister, despite all its clichés and lazy writing, still has an ominous and unsettling atmosphere that is an overall strength. It falters in places where jump scares are attempted and fail. It also loses it in places where a segment could have been creepier but just drags on instead. Yet, when it comes back to the 8mm films, the dread that the tone and music place on the situation, and the imagery used, ends up being a strength.

Image: Lionsgate Films

That's all I have to say really. I can't really think of examples that wouldn't spoil the good parts by sharing it here.

Foul: Predictability

When I sat down to watch Sinister, I had no idea that I had already seen this movie. I'm not saying that I had watched it and forgotten. I'm saying that this movie uses enough ideas from elsewhere that it made me feel deja vu. Sinister is so predictable, that I was able to shout out my predictions within 10 minutes of the movie rolling with 90% accuracy. Some of the twists were blatantly telegraphed, but some of the others were easy to see coming just out of predictability.

During the moments when Ellison is wandering around in the dark, I noted, to the millisecond, how this movie matched my internal jump-scare countdown clock. When your audience is able to predict the movie down to the jump-scare timing, you have a problem with originality, as well as pacing. This is a huge problem for the case of Sinister, because, up to this point, the biggest weakness was its lazy writing. However, moments like this show that even the direction and editing have significant fundamental flaws.

Image: Lionsgate Films

It follows a formula, and as soon as the viewer recognizes the formula, the tension is lost. In the first 20 minutes of Sinister, the movie tries to scare you with the son acting like he's possessed in the middle of the night. It's too early in the movie to try to scare us with something that has any weight, like possession because nothing has been done to indicate that possession is a possible risk. Take a good horror movie like The Conjuring. That told us possession was a possibility within the first 10 minutes through the use of the Annabelle doll and what the characters said, so it was always a risk throughout the rest of the film. Sinister uses the bizarre behavior of a character we don't know to try to scare us. It also has not made any indication that these characters are expendable or at risk. It's a scare tactic with no impact on the story, with a predictable reason as to why the son acts that way, which you can likely guess before the characters say it. Had the boy suddenly exploded, or something random killed a family member or just a note Ellison found that said something like "I'll take your child," then I would have been more on edge. The movie would have at least shown me that it's not so predictable and that anything goes. Instead, it's a false scare, like so many others, and nothing like it really ever happens again, making it a waste of time.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

I realize that while I said Sinister was half-good, it may have come across a bit more in the negative territory from my review. It's mainly because your enjoyment of Sinister will hinge heavily on how well you can ignore the flaws, which are rather nit-picky by horror movie standards. If the lazy writing and predictability don’t bother you, then you'll enjoy Sinister, in all likelihood. The home video segments and parts of the atmosphere are genuinely unsettling and well-done, to the point that it manages to make the film stand out a little bit, despite its best efforts to be derivative. However is it Fair or Foul?

Image: Lionsgate Films

Fair or Foul?

Despite all of my nit-picking and gripes with Sinister, I think it narrowly makes it into the Fair territory. Maybe I'm being too generous with my first ruling, but I at least had a little fun watching it and derived some entertainment from the various drinking game rules I was making up as I went ("I'm a writer," Slipknot's guitarist appears, jump scare, unrealistic behavior, etc).