The photographer, Patrick (Audley), has received a disquieting note from his sister Caroline ( Upstream Color’s terrific Amy Seimetz), who has cleaned up after drug-abuse problems and given her life over to a Christian parish.
Its skillful execution of a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any better in fact, the scrupulousness with which West and his crew evoke the past make the film that much more unsavory.ĪJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Kentucker Audley lead a cast of familiar indie faces as a three-person documentary crew from Vice magazine, which specializes in provocative overseas expeditions. It exists in an unsettling no-man’s-land between escapist entertainment and real-life tragedy, and the scarier it gets, the more cruelly exploitative it seems. Where most found-footage movies spend half their time with formless dilly-dallying before finally ramping up the scares, The Sacrament feels very much like a Ti West film, loose in its documentary format, but shrewd in the way it picks up on the small, accumulating disturbances at a rural commune that isn’t the utopia it appears to be.Īnd yet while The Sacrament affirms West’s talent and versatility, the film’s basic conceit is a failure of taste, alluding so heavily to the 1978 Jonestown massacre that it feels like a ghoulish recreation of history. Miraculously, that style carries over to The Sacrament, which isn’t an exercise in retro style at all, but the latest example of the ubiquitous found-footage-or, in this case, mock-documentary-form that’s become dominant in the digital age. With the one-two punch of The House Of The Devil and The Innkeepers, director Ti West established himself as indie horror’s preeminent classicist, someone with a deep understanding of the genre’s past and the patience to craft films of sustained, creeping dread.
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