Review of Sinister (2012) by Stuart M — 11 Nov 2015

Oh man, here I went in expecting a film about a left-handed person and I got a horror film instead. Curse my classical education!

The film's got a lot of good atmosphere and some creepy ideas. What lets it down is the idiotic behavior of our lead. More than usual in any other film with a haunted house/child this guy's asking for trouble. He moves into a crime scene, finds tapes of murder victims, and starts seeing ghosts and other creepy stuff. He tells no one. Typical macho guy behavior doesn't even begin to cover this. That's why they try their best to give him reasons not to go for help. And it's a good attempt. He's a true crime writer who messed up a big case and got an innocent man convicted, so he wants the solving of this clearly massive case to be his own and nobody else's. That's a good setup, but it only goes so far. When you start hearing people moving around your attic at night and your son starts acting crazy you'd have to be a crazy asshole to stay. So they make clear he's a selfish asshole. But even this has limits to how far it can take it. When you start being haunted by the guy in the videos and start to see ghosts appear in photos of yourself it's difficult to think of anything that would keep you there. And that's the problem. They recognized the flaw in their setup and tried their best to cover it up, but the story requires him to be just impossibly stupid and stubborn. You sorta want to see him taken out.