The latest film from recent horror sensation Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), The Sacrament, is thrilling and intense, to say the least, but it’s hard to say whether or not it would actually qualify as being horrific. Traditionally, the horror genre gets the bulk of its chills from the fear of the unknown, from putting a danger in the shadows and building tension as its threat grows. This film so closely resembles a very real and very publicized event in modern history, however, that it ends up feeling a lot more like a historical drama than it does a horror movie—or even a thriller—and I can’t help but think that it robs itself of some intensity by tying itself so closely to an event that society has already had decades to digest. A historical drama would be fine, of course. Nobody is saying that West has to make one type of movie. But once the third act proves to so thoroughly stick to the Ti West format in content and execution, one can’t help but think that throwing the audience a bit of a curveball would have been a welcome choice.
The historical event that West builds his story off of is the Jonestown Massacre. Instead of just making a movie set in Jonestown, however, West sets his film in a modern day lookalike of Jim Jones’ would-be utopia, and we watch the events that unfold there through the lenses of real-life media outlet Vice’s cameras. This is a strange choice, because the charismatic cult leader that works as the black heart of Wests’ film, Father (Gene Jones), sticks pretty closely to Jones’ MO, the overseas community that he’s built, Eden Parish, looks pretty much exactly like Jonestown, and the events that take place over the course of the film almost exactly mirror those that occurred over the last couple days of Jonestown. Ultimately, West’s film plays like a slightly sanitized recreation of the footage shot there, because the body count this film amasses cuts the body count of the real tragedy at least in half. Just image search pictures of the real thing. Horrible.
With a little bit more of a twist on the Jonestown story, a left turn or two into material that didn’t so closely recreate the real life event, West could have probably added a lot more mystery and dread to the build of his story, which would have helped keep the film from feeling like time-filler until an insane, inevitable finale. Then again, perhaps my problems with the film will seem overstated to others less hung up on the source material, and those who haven’t seen footage of Jonestown might not share them at all. There is a lot to like here, after all. Jones is absolutely captivating as the cult figure who sits in the shadows of the film. The scene where he completely takes over an interview where the Vice reporters (AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg) meant to corner him is great. And that last act, where everything goes bad—I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen anything so pointedly difficult to watch. West is able to get under your skin and make you deeply feel the horrors of fundamentalism taken to its extreme. It’s just strange that he didn’t do it by either telling more of an original story, or by flat-out making a Jonestown movie and removing the layer of emotional separation that this fictionalization provides.
