The Sacra­ment

Ti West is that rare thing – a direc­tor who makes hor­ror movies who is not a hor­ror movie direc­tor. That is to say, he knows his oats when it comes to the genre, but treats his mate­r­i­al with a rev­er­ence that large­ly rejects glib namecheck­ing, expect­ed gore mon­ey-shots and fan­boy-pan­der­ing cliché. Even his one ​“for hire” job, a sequel to Cab­in Fever from which he even­tu­al­ly lob­bied to have his name removed, con­tains the ker­nel of inborn sub­ver­sive­ness, his appro­pri­a­tion of stock tropes pro­duc­ing some­thing that’s far more inter­est­ing than a piece of stock, b‑movie hackwork.

The Sacra­ment is his largest-scale project to date, and arrives on the tail of two retro hor­ror clas­sics in the form of 2009’s House of the Dev­il and 2011’s The Innkeep­ers. Pre­mier­ing at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val (no SXSW or Sun­dance for West!), the film cer­tain­ly has art film cre­do, but is per­haps the director’s most for­mu­la­ic and safe to date. But it’s still amply packed with chill­ing plea­sures, dead-eyed vio­lence and the con­tin­u­ing theme of young peo­ple grav­i­tat­ing towards voca­tions that lead to self-destruction.

Satiris­ing Vice doc­u­men­taries and their pre­sen­ters’ predilec­tion for endan­ger­ing the lives of them­selves and their sub­jects for the sake of audi­ence kicks, the film sees a trio of gung-ho dude-bros head­ing to the fic­ti­tious cult utopia of Eden Parish in search of the lead presenter’s recent­ly estranged sis­ter. The set­tle­ment is lord­ed over by avi­a­tor-shad­ed good ol’ boy, The Father (Gene Jones), an appar­ent­ly benign self-styled mes­si­ah fig­ure who occa­sion­al­ly gifts his blissed-out broth­er­hood with open-air ser­mons pep­pered with sedi­tious slo­gans and com­mon sense easy answers.

Some­thing is fishy, and the Vice crew just can’t seem to spot any flaws in the sys­tem. Every­one they talk to appears inspired by and thank­ful to the Father, and the cre­ation of this enclave has helped save these lost souls from the twin-dev­ils of com­mer­cial­ism and pop­u­lar religion.

In the way that he struc­tures his films, West usu­al­ly opts for 90 per cent slow-build set-up fol­lowed by a cli­mac­tic 10 per cent explo­sion of extreme vio­lence before the cred­its roll. With The Sacra­ment, he’s tin­kered with the for­mu­la, and it’s sad­ly to the detri­ment of the dra­ma as a whole. The first half of the film is very strong, as the sug­ges­tion of some­thing evil lurk­ing behind the smiles and the muslin shawls is far more unnerv­ing than the gun-blaz­ing action which occurs after the pen­ny final­ly drops. That’s not to say that the sec­ond por­tion of the film isn’t with­out mer­it, but West is so much bet­ter at infer­ence and clev­er­ly cloak­ing the shock­ing sur­pris­es than he is at exe­cut­ing those surprises.

It’s prob­a­bly bad form to be chid­ing this film by say­ing that it’s not like the director’s oth­er films, but there’s a clas­si­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty that’s miss­ing here due to West’s deci­sion to frame the sto­ry as a film with­in a film. As such, the crum­my hand-held DV pro­duc­tion val­ues pre­clude much of the excep­tion­al cam­er­a­work and exem­plary fram­ing seen in his pre­vi­ous two films. Jones per­for­mance as the Father, though, is spe­cial, man­ag­ing to chan­nel a crooked, tin-pot south­ern sen­a­tor along with the eerie inten­si­ty of late-peri­od Robert Mitchum.