Sonic Cinema

Sounds, Visions and Insights by Brian Skutle

Sinister 2

Grade : C Year : 2015 Director : Ciarán Foy Running Time : 1hr 37min Genre :
Movie review score
C

Apart from the film I saw with my now-fiancee as we started down the path we are on now, Scott Derrickson’s “Sinister” is a smart, intriguing horror mystery. By having a writer explore the unexplained aspects of a family’s death, and a missing child, and going down a rabbit hole of the supernatural, Derrickson and his co-writer, C. Robert Cargill, take the audience on a terrifying journey where the terrible truth is not understood until the very end. It’s a haunting experience.

Written by Derrickson and Cargill, “Sinister 2” has some of the elements that made “Sinister” so good. Unfortunately, director Ciarán Foy (a relative newcomer to features) doesn’t have quite the skill for storytelling and suspense that Derrickson does, and on top of that, the follow-up story Derrickson and Cargill give him to tell just doesn’t have a strong center. Ethan Hawke’s author in the first film was a compelling, morally-questionable person to hang that film on; this time, we have a sheriff’s deputy from the first film (James Ransone) and a scared mother of two (Shannyn Sossamon) with an abusive ex-husband, and they can’t really compare. The deputy, who doesn’t even have a name, is a good side character for this type of a movie, but can’t be put out front without the film losing something. Having a single mother and her kids at the center of a horror film is a well-worn trope, but the introduction of domestic abuse as part of the story makes the supernatural horror that is the backbone of this film feel even seedier, and not in an effective way. Unless there’s an organic reason for mixing real-world terror with supernatural horror, there’s no need to have both elements in the same film. The premise of the world of Bughuul, the entity haunting the people in the “Sinister” films, was well established in the first film– there doesn’t need to be the inclusion of something as genuinely horrifying as domestic abuse and child abuse to make these films scarier. Bughuul, and how he operates, is more than enough to terrify audiences, and when the film sticks with that, “Sinister 2” has the atmosphere (both in it’s cinematography and production design and the score by tomandandy, who recycles liberally from Christopher Young’s score for the original) and imagery to hold up to the original. The home movies, in particular, wherein we see the work of Bughuul and his acolytes, continue to be unnerving sights– if only the rest of the movie were as comfortably uncomfortable to watch as those were.

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