AFI Fest Review: ‘The Sacrament’

A new wave of horror has come in the form of “mumblegore,” and I’ve not yet drunk its kool-aid (that phrase is an appropriate one to use in a review for this film, as you’ll come to understand in a moment). I get the idea of using “realistic” verbal patter and slow-burn plot development to create a more immersive experience, but none of these films have been able to fully subsume me in themselves. I will say this for The Sacrament, though: it comes closer to creating that immersion than any other mumblegore film I’ve yet seen.

A.J. Bowen plays Sam, a reporter for VICE who believes he’s struck journalistic gold with a story from his photographer friend Patrick (Kentucker Audley). Patrick’s sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) has fallen in with a cult that has recently moved from Mississippi to the South American jungle, establishing the “clean living” community of Eden Parish. The Parish is led by an enigmatic man known only as “Father,” and boasts of its members’ closeness as a family, a nigh-utopian existence. Sam, Patrick, and cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg) set out to document the story. The group arrives in Eden Parish, the residents are enormously welcoming, all approve of Caroline’s decision, and they leave without incident. That is a joke. Of course Things Are Not As They Seem™ and Everything Goes Wrong™.

From reading up on The Sacrament, I knew beforehand that writer/director Ti West took inspiration from Jonestown for Eden Parish. But the movie does more than just reference that cult – almost everything about both the setup and the eventual horror that transpires is a recreation of Jonestown. With the notable exceptions that Eden Parish is a tenth of the size of Jonestown (due to budget constraints) and that there is no investigating congressional party in play, the movie recreates the end of Jonestown almost exactly. At certain points, Father even recites verbatim the words of Jim Jones.

Father is probably the best part of the film. He’s played by Gene Jones, previously only recognizable as the lucky gas station clerk from No Country for Old Men. He’s dynamite here, carrying all the swagger of a Dixie-fried power preacher. He oozes the brand of charisma that seems off-putting to outsiders but seduces the emotionally vulnerable and soothes those who are already under its sway. That’s the face of fevered religious revival and cult-building. Everything about Jones’s performance is dead-on, from his rotund jollity to his good ol’ boy bravado. He wears his sunglasses at night. His true intentions are always concealed.

The rest of the cast does a good job as well, although unlike Jones, they are all stuck in the found footage standard of basically having to perform the duties of escorts in a haunted house. So much of their dialogue and plot purpose is purely functional. Even details like Sam having a pregnant wife feel like little more than fulfillments of narrative obligation. There’s no sense of a sibling relationship between Patrick and Caroline, which means that a climactic scene which could have been chilling and heartbreaking in equal measure hits with muted potency. Like all found footage cameramen, Jake is just kind of there, continuing to film things long after any sane person would have dropped the camera. The best I can say about him is that Joe Swanberg isn’t as grating an acting presence as I usually find him, although it helps that he’s mostly an off-screen voice.

One impressive aspect of The Sacrament is how well the found footage angle is pulled off. The conceit is that this is a legitimate VICE production*, and the camera work, titling, and editing all work to capture the feel of those “immersive” documentaries. I got legitimate douche-chills a few times, so well does the film capture the VICE voice. This also means that the oft-hated queasy camerawork of the style is mercifully absent. In fact, the movie looks so good that it reinforces my feeling that it would have been better off as a straightforward work. It’s halfway to a straight adaptation of the Jonestown story already – I’d have rather seen something that captured the full nuance of a situation like that of the Peoples Temple. The roller coaster tone of found footage is alienating from immersion in this respect, not an asset.

After a nicely-paced setup period, The Sacrament really hits its stride as the shit hits the fan in Eden Parish. It’s vaguely exploitative of a tragedy that isn’t that old, and it can only jump the pulse and never truly horrify, but it’s effective. Overall, the film didn’t make me a believer in Ti West or the mumblegore gang, although it did make me a believer in Gene Jones.

Grade: C

*And I have little trouble believing that, if one of their journalists captured horrifying video of death and mayhem, VICE would turn it into a documentary.