SINISTER

Blumhouse Production

Directed by:  Scott Derrickson

Starring by: Ethan Hawke, Juliette Rylance, Fred Thompson, James Ransone

The first image of family murdered that impressed on Super-8 footage film catch my sight in a close moment. Four members of the family who standing beneath a tree with hoods over their head and nooses around their neck. When tree branch is cut and pulled all members of the family, it tickling my curiosity for the unseen suspect who done such nasty thing. The main character, true-criminal’s novelist names Ellison Oswalt always tickling every writer like me to watch the movie carefully.  

Ellison Oswalt took his families to live in the house which become the location of the murdered family who was hanged maybe looks odd. But what Oswalt do, that’s something ordinary for such writer. 

We, sometimes, do such things to get fully impression so we could write our story as live as it can be. And  as a true crime writer, Oswalt surely want to do that. I know how Oswalt feels when he watched the murdered story from the snuff movies that he found from the movie box which left in the attic.

The movies shows many families being murdered in various ways: having their throats slit in bed (Sleepy Time ’98), being burnt to death in a car (BBQ ’79), being drowned in their pool (Pool party ’66), being run over by lawn mower (Lawn Work ’86), and the hanging that opened the movie (Family Hanging Out’11).

Each murder happened in different place, different time, and the most important thing is never heard by public before…so he knows that the story could become his next success after the hits of Kentucky’s Blood novel many years ago, which made him motivated to write the case.

This film has a neat plot. Robert Cargill works excellently on the detail, but I think there’s too much explanation. He built the story by question, and giving more question about the prime suspect who killed each of the families, where the kids go, and who abduct them? 

He leads us to the Mr. Boogie, who later became the mysterious suspect who’s behind all of this, very slowly so the audience is not given a sufficient portion of fear that they expected.

Frankly, there’s a little mistake on the continuity. Near the beginning of the film, we see Ashley painting a girl in red on the wall. We see that Ashley has painted the girl fully in red, in the next shot we see that the girl has a white space where the red paint was before. But I like the effect, such an image of the Mr.Boogie inside Oswallt’s laptop who suddenly turned around and look at him. It really cool…

I also admire Cargill who can take us to the different perspective about Mr. Boogie. The symbol that Oswalt found on each place of the crime scene leads him to an occult creature from the pagan’s era, Bughuul, the demon who always took the children. 

Bughuul has other name on Summerian culture, Moloch, the fallen angel that thrown away to hell along with Lucifer and his favorites is abduct the children. In English way, Bughuul sometimes called by Boogey…and if you already seen the Boogeyman, then Sinister is some of the cultivation from it.

The film tries to deceive audience by lead the suspect to Trevor. But I know that he’s just a decoy. The real villain is Ashley and it’s seen from the night when Ashley was visited by little Stephanie that already become a ghost, and she react nothing when Ashley put her finger in front of her mouth, told her not to talk to Oswallt when he check on Ashely’s room. After that, there’s no emotion changing from young Ashley when kids usually turned out to be frightened to dead when they’ve experienced such a thing.

Ashley also looks happy when Oswallt finally order Tracy to move along to their previous house. Because it speed up the killing ritual because the police deputy tell Oswallt that he found out the connection from each of the murdered, that each of the families had move from the murdered house to another house which become the next location. 

It’s a little bit disappointed to me, smart writer who create novel hits, which mad every police in the country hate him most, finally beat by the small town deputy who told him the motif. Whereas Oswallt who gathered all the information and made the physical evidence but can’t see the connection. So much for The Great Ellison Oswallt. He deserves to die…