Movie Review: The Sacrament

By Less Lee Moore

Suspense is vital to the horror genre. Blood and guts can be effective, true, but without suspense, they’re just gore. Filmmaker Ti West has proven that he can build tension in a film until we’re begging for release. The House of the Devil was a master class in how to freak the hell out of audiences starved for actual scares. Plus, it’s just a great movie. The Innkeepers was less terrifying, but still worthwhile, and West’s contribution to the first V/H/S found footage anthology, “Second Honeymoon” is one of the few films in the last five years to make me sleep with the lights on. What’s most impressive about that is the way absolutely nothing happens in the film for the longest time, so the payoff is inexplicably frightening.

All of this made me extremely excited for The Sacrament, especially since West was once again tackling found footage (a style which I quite like), but this time using the real-life events at Jonestown as the basis for his film. It makes me sad to report that The Sacrament did not live up to my expectations.

The Sacrament follows a couple of VICE reporters named Sam and Jake who venture out to the (fictional) Eden Parish commune on a tip from fashion photographer Patrick that something might be amiss with his sister Caroline, who’s been living there after years of unsuccessful drug rehab programs. Right away there’s an odd blurring of the lines between fiction and real-life. While the found footage conceit does require a bit of suspension of disbelief, the title cards set up the fictional story and then the actual film credits display over alleged documentary footage. In addition, there are constant shifts between the points of view of the cameraman Jake and someone who doesn’t exist in the world of the movie, making it difficult to accept that what we’re seeing is supposed to be real.

On the other hand, West is able to cleverly subvert expectations. Jake and Sam, true to their VICE origins, come across as jaded hipsters, but when they admit to being genuinely afraid of the commune guards with machine guns, it’s a nice breakdown of their façade. Perhaps West is trying to comment on the conflict between VICE‘s slick posturing and its sometimes surprisingly insightful and gritty political reporting, and if so, he does a great job.

Another thing that works in The Sacrament‘s favor is the multiple interviews with people of color. Sam, Jake, Patrick, and Caroline are all white and fairly privileged, so the African-American nurse and the two brothers who swear that they would die before they’d go back to the US seem like actual people and not actors. This jibes with the real-life story of Jonestown, since much of the impetus for Jonestown was Jim Jones’s anti-racist beliefs.

Yet hewing so closely to the real-life events of Jonestown might ultimately be The Sacrament‘s undoing. For those unfamiliar with what happened in November of 1978, The Sacrament will be a chilling history lesson. For the rest of us, it feels like an exceptionally well-made documentary with no surprises.

As “Father,” the coincidentally named Gene Jones is charismatic and convincing up until the second that he becomes creepy and one can easily understand why hundreds of people were swayed by his ideas on utopia. It’s to West’s credit that he was able to capture the essence of the real-life Jonestown so successfully, but I can’t help wishing that he had pulled a Law & Order-style left turn with the narrative. Then again, real life is much stranger and often scarier than fiction.

The Sacrament was released by Magnet Releasing on iTunes and On Demand on May 1 and will be in theaters on June 6.