Yeah, not bad - it did its best

Rating: 7/10 (28 May 2014)

I suppose how much you enjoy Sinister will depend on how well you know your horror movies. Enough time has elapsed since The Ring for Hollywood to think that most audiences will have forgotten about 'that sort of horror.' Ethan Hawke plays a real-crime writer, who deliberately moves his family into the home of another family who were all murdered, so that he can study tapes of the crime for his upcoming book. Once there, he naturally starts finding himself in the middle of all sorts of spooky goings on.
The Ring had a 'killer video tape,' whereas Sinister has... well, it's not completely different. And instead of a female lead investigating it, you have Ethan Hawke. And so on. Okay, so Sinister isn't a complete rip-off of The Ring, but it just felt like it was definitely in the same area of dark, brooding, supernatural, creepy horror.
And it's not bad. With the seemingly endless flow of monster/ghost movies out there, it takes something a little different to stand out. And Sinister just about manages to raise its head above the pile. If you read the marketing, you'll see people raving about just how scary it was. I didn't find it that scary, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it.
It is quite dark - by that I mean literally (not just the subject matter, which, obviously, is also quite dark). The film is mainly shot inside one house which you could be forgiven for thinking that they don't have a single light bulb in any room. Some may say that adds to the atmosphere, others may find it too hard to tell what's going on. Perhaps my only gripe would be that I found the whole family a little annoying. Ethan Hawke's character is obsessed with being famous. His 'loving' wife never seems to bother looking after the kids, leaving all disciplining to him (it even took me a while to work out whether the mother was actually the biological mother or a stepmother, as she repeatedly refers to the children - when speaking to her husband - as "your children"). Plus the kids themselves are hardly endearing - the girl's okay, but the boy (don't be fooled by his haircut - he IS a boy) is surly and generally unlikeable.
It's no classic, but it does offer enough different to make it worth a watch.
Special mention to the local sheriff's deputy - just a minor, if quite cool character.
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