Ti West and Eli Roth's The Sacrament

[Holmes]

Available on demand and on iTunes right now. It will be released in theatres in select cities in June.

My review, containing a few modest "spoilers":

[Show spoiler]Co-produced by Eli Roth, The Sacrament is the new film by Ti West, an independent director who has earned fans with slow-burning and old-fashioned supernatural genre films, including The House of the Devil. The plot is set in motion when a fashion photographer is contacted by his estranged sister, a long-term drug user. Claiming she is rehabilitated, she reveals she is now living abroad in an isolated Christian commune, which she invites him to visit. With a pair of journalists from the alternative magazine VICE in tow, he travels into the jungle to find her and investigate. Beyond a fence guarded by men with machine guns, they find a serene, technology-free agricultural community lorded over by "Father," a charismatic preacher. Father's disciples argue for peace, love, and freedom from the pace of the modern world, but dangerous secrets lie beneath the surface.

There is no point in denying or dancing around this fact: Father is a super-thinly-fictionalized representation of James "Jim" Jones, the notorious Indiana-born religious leader who, in the late 1970s, led his legion of believers, consisting largely of impoverished African Americans, to Guyana and later forced them to commit suicide rather than contend with outside intrusion. He also ordered the murder of Leo Ryan, a California politician with a particular interest in investigating cults, and four others at a nearby airfield on the same day. I knew The Sacrament drew inspiration from Jones and the tragedy he wrought before watching the film, but it made me far more uncomfortable than I expected. In many respects, the film adheres to the true story beat for beat except Ryan and his colleagues are replaced by the VICE reporters, and the plot is revealed via their cameras (a "found-footage" format). The dual aims—to build suspense and tease the audience in the interest of popcorn entertainment while also recreating Jones' enormous crime—clash against each other rather than coalesce.

There is, I admit, admirable craftsmanship and showmanship on display as suspense slowly mounts via nervous sideways glances and other modest indications of the nightmare to come. West is as ever a master of subtle time-release dread. However, by the time the images we cannot help but anticipate do come (babies administered poison via a syringe, elderly men and women holding each other as they taste the poisoned juice), they send one's mind to an extreme and haunting place, and it is distasteful to see them blended with footage of co-star Joe Swanberg racing around the jungle playing a game of Paranormal Activity. In my personal opinion, West's well-honed directorial gifts and the imposing, magnetic performance of Gene Jones as Father are worthy of a certain amount of objective praise, but nothing compensates for the resulting nausea as a grotesque event which resulted in over 900 futile deaths is exploited for empty-headed, sensationalist entertainment. Other people's mileage will surely vary.

C