"The Sacrament" (2014)

After mining the past for two assured horror films, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, writer-director Ti West looks to present day horror for his latest film The Sacrament. The film adopts the popular, in-vogue conventions of found footage horror with mixed results. 

To say West doesn’t look to the past isn’t entirely true though. The classical model of slow-burning, mounting dread that made his previous features so good remains. But West also borrows from the literal, recent past, drawing upon certain events from an infamous late 1970’s religious cult in an exploitative and obvious way.

This is to say nothing of how the limitations of found footage hamstring West at nearly every turn. West begins with a limited premise and traps it in limited film-making techniques and storytelling options.

Reporters for VICE Sam (AJ Bowen) and Jake (Joe Swanberg) join their co-worker Patrick (Kentucker Audley) to meet his sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz), a recovered drug-addict living at a secluded Latin American commune called Eden Parish. Sam and Jake are hoping to record their latest story on this oddball place that requires them to secretly take a helicopter to a remote location and pass through a gate with armed guards -- despite this supposedly being a peaceful, hippie-like community. 

Patrick suspects he’s going to need to convince his sister to leave this crazy place, but to his and his co-workers’ surprise Eden Parish appears normal, outwardly anyway, at least. This being a horror film though, that obviously is not the case, and West provides a lot of anxious-laden interviews amongst the members of the commune. It all appears normal and pleasant but West keeps surreptitiously hinting that something is slightly off. This primarily comes from the portent mentions of the camp’s leader called simply, eerily Father (Gene Jones). 

West smartly keeps Father off-screen for a good thirty minutes before revealing him in the film’s excellent, unsettling centerpiece in which Sam interviews Father in front of all the commune’s inhabitants. Jones is great as Father suggesting menace behind a veneer of Southern, grandfatherly goodness, and throughout the interview he works the crowd like a priest and a conman. 

West is great at the build-up but he plays into every bit of familiarity that you suspect here. The commune is exactly what we assume it to be, and though it isn’t Jonestown in name it might as well be for how much West utilizes those images to uneasily and unfairly create a reaction. West skids into all the simple preceding suggestions and it saps the horror and excitement from what occurs. Beyond this, West doesn’t add anything original to the genre of found footage; there isn’t anything here that hasn’t been endlessly played out since The Blair Witch Project. 

Grade: C