Delayed Reaction: The Sacrament

Premise: VICE journalists visit a remote religious commune/cult where one of their siblings live to see what it's really about.

 

This is a found-footage movie, so I'm going to reflexively give it high marks. This is an impeccably credentialed horror movie with Ti West writing and directing and Joe Swanberg in a lead role. Both men have direct ties to the V/H/S franchise and have a strong collection of other movies they've made. Even having Eli Roth as a producer and cowriter is a plus. The fact that they have enough clout to get permission from VICE is impressive. The thinly-veiled Jonestown parallels make this movie immediately tense and engaging. Found-footage for supernatural horror is scary, but using that style for something based on actual history that's completely plausible is chilling. I really liked the broad strokes of this.

 

The movie is a little thin though. 5 minutes in, I picked up on the Jonestown comparison, so the fact that it played out exactly the same is a little disappointing. I spent the whole movie waiting for that last twist: the moment when it says "We know you're familiar with Jonestown, so we're going to add this too". That didn't happen, so I was more underwhelmed by the story than if I'd never heard of Jonestown. It also doesn't help that similar premises in the last decade have ramped this idea up a lot. The cult short in V/H/S/2 from the same year as this goes MUCH bigger. Midsommar a few years latter ramped up the tension even more and got a lot weirder. So, The Sacrament looks tame by comparison.

 

Also, I don't really get why this all happened. The story of the movie, that is. They invite these VICE reporters in then, in less than a day, decide that their entire way of life has been ruined. If memory serves, Jonestown had to get around to killing a Congressman before going to a mass suicide. Couldn't Eden Parish just take the VICE video footage and send the reporters back with nothing but hearsay? This all went from 0 to Kool-Aid pretty fast. I wonder how they lasted this long with such itchy trigger fingers.

 

I really wish this movie had less score too. A musical score for a mockumentary works, but for something like this, that's supposed to appear to be raw footage, it takes away some of the verisimilitude. Then again, I've never watched VICE. Perhaps over-scoring is a trademark of that program.

 

Despite these complaints, as I said at the beginning, The Sacrament is well-executed found-footage on a technical level. It has plenty of rising tension and vicious third act, so I did like the movie. It just had a lot of room to be great that it failed to capitalize on. Given that the last found-footage movie I watched before this was Hell House LLC, I suppose anything was going to be a letdown.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend