Sinister is very unsettling and definitely left with me.

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2012)

For someone who has watched many horror films, slasher movies etc, I have found that I go into these types of movies with the same expectancy: It's going to suck, but I'm gonna enjoy the few jump-scares, creepy audio, obvious natures of oncoming deaths, and terrible acting. I will enjoy this movie no matter how bad it is, and I will love to hate it.
I walked into Sinister with no knowledge of it whatsoever. I didn't watch a preview, read any articles on it, nothing. I had no idea what it was about aside from what was on the poster. If you haven't seen the poster, it's basically a girl spreading a lot of blood on the wall behind her with a creepy, demonic face made from the blood. The tag-line is "Once you see him, nothing can save you." I thought it was going to be about some murderer/demon type antagonist who follows this poor girl and tries to kill her the whole movie and kills her friends, family, loved ones and so forth until she triumphs and rids the planet of the bad guy. Then the camera would pan down and you'd see the guy wink or twitch and cut to credits.
Never have I been more wrong. Skip to the next paragraph due to possible spoilers. The movie opens up with what looks like a home made movie of four people getting hanged in a tree in slow motion. This lasts the entire opening credits and immediately raises my heart rate a bit. The movie uses this and other home movies to drive the plot and it's honestly very well done. After each movie I felt unsettled and disturbed. The way that it seemed so much like documentary and that it was a personal camera was just eerie. Almost as if it would be put on youtube. The movie follows Ellison (Ethan Hawke) as a true-crime novelist who has moved to the house that that hanging had occurred, and He doesn't reveal this information to his wife Tracy (newcomer Juliet Rylance) or his family. Strange events happen as Ellison finds a box full of those home movies showing different murders. As he watches each murder scenario, he tries to link them together and possibly benefit off of it, but it soon changes as Ellison tries to save his family from being murdered as well.
The acting was great. Hawke and Rylance worked well together in the tense and serene moments of the movie. Dialogue didn't seem forced or cliché in comparison to other tense moments in horror films, and it flows well. I didn't find myself lost or wondering what was just said. Their children also did well and everyone meshed well together in this movie.
I could see some jump scares coming from a mile away, but they were still done well. The idea of finding-footage horror is a bit overdone, but it was portrayed well in this movie. I found that the use of "old" technology such as a film projector was done well whilst being enveloped in iMacs and iPhones. The film felt modern and the setting was defined well.
Audio. Audio is key to a horror film. Sinister has great audio in all of the right scenes to keep a low-grade set of tension simmering at almost all times. Even in the nice well-lit scenes, you are always expecting something bad or scary to happen. The music for the home movies was done quite well and had a good creepy vibe to each scenario, and every time the house was dark, the ambiance was great.
I was annoyed at the fact that he never turned on any of his lights to any room in his house at any point whatsoever. This didn't take from the movie too much, but some scenes he could have just flipped a light switch up for reassurance. I guess this was a way to increase tension, and it worked. I also didn't like how little was explained about their son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario)'s Night Terrors. I had no idea what that even was, and it was just assumed that it was normal for him to be doing what he was doing. But that is just my lack of knowledge.
Those home movies definitely stuck with me after leaving the theater. I have an over-active imagination, and driving home was tense and nerve-racking. The film did its job. It didn't scare me as much as it disturbed me, but it did leave me looking over my shoulder even while typing this review. I know it's just a movie, but this was a refreshing horror flick. It's good to get some fright out of me, whether it was the movie or my imagination, this helped.
I absolutely recommend it.