Sinister

SXSW's not-so-secret screening was the first public screening of Sinister, exactly as everyone thought.  While I appreciate all the effort they went to for the film to screen here, it just didn't work for me like I'd hoped.  Ellison (Ethan Hawke) is a true-crime writer seeking his second Big Novel, having suffered several unspecified failures.  He moves his family - wife Trace (Juliet Rylance), son Trevor (Michael Hall D'addario), and daughter Ashley (Clare Foley) into the house of his latest focus, a family of five where four members were hung from a tree in the back yard, and the final member, a daughter Stephanie, disappeared.

Very quickly the scope of the crime grows when Ellison finds a box of "Home Movies" in the attic, along with a Super 8 film projector.  The first film shows the murder of the family - a film the police never found.  The other four films show the deaths of similar families, each killed by a different method, each in a different state, and each (as he later learns) with a missing child, stretched out over the past 45 years.  At the same time the supernatural events in the house lead him to believe that maybe the killer never left...

I didn't think Ellison's actions were plausible, something admittedly I can overlook (as I often must) for horror films.  The real problems though were in the ending.  I have BIG SPOILERS below the film info below.  Read on only if you have seen the film or have no intention of doing so.

Sinister
2012, directed by Scott Derrickson










THESE ARE SPOILERS!  Things that just didn't work:
1. The biggest problem is the slow, all-cards-on-the-table ending.  We just didn't need everything spelled out like that in passionless film.  First the kids should not have already been mindless automatons when they killed their families.  It would have been better if they were doing it scared shitless and crying, while being forced to by the Boogie Man.  And what Ashley does after Ellison dies seems redundant.  Who cares that the kids live in the film?  The movie should have ended the instance Ellison was killed, his family dying first.
2. When Ellison learned that one dead family previously lived in a home that was itself the scene of an earlier film, it was obvious the same would be true for all the other murders.  It also meant that "family piles into the car and flees" would never be a suitable ending.  Either they'd need to fight and win, or they wouldn't make it.  That's all fine, except that the phone call from the deputy at the end where he explains all of this is completely pointless.  I got it already, thanks, don't slow things down.  Maybe the only useful bit is the deputy's comment that his action might have "accelerated the schedule" which was somehow true but really never explained.  Why'd they need to die the day they moved?  The other families clearly lived at least a little while in their new homes based on the films.
3.  Why did the Boogie Man switch to Super 8 in the 1960s?  Was that when he stopped using photographs?  During the course of the film - which could also double as an Apple product instructional video - Ellison proves the editing superiority of digital cameras and a computer.  I think it would have been more satisfactory somehow if Ashley was filming on her dad's digicam at the end, with a USB stick dropped in the Home Movies box if that clip isn't cut (as it wouldn't be I guess if they want a sequel segue.)  The Boogie Man needs to keep up with the times or else he'll be stuck with a family that doesn't even know what the Super 8 projector is.