Critic Reviews

It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.

The scares are not just intense but unyielding in this compelling horror yarn from "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" director Scott Derrickson.

Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.

Rather than another drearily workaday horror picture, Sinister uses the supernatural to underline its examination of the all-too-human foibles of insecurity and myopic self-centeredness. As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.

Now this is a scary movie. And, given that it's a horror film, that means it's a good one. [18 Oct 2012]

The movie makes up for uneven dialogue and pacing issues through sheer horrific imagery.

I knew perfectly well, after a while, what Sinister was going to scare me with. But I got scared anyway.

And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes, the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't.

Even though the ending is inescapable (and therefore predictable), that does little to diminish its effectiveness.

It comes together with a gruesome though excellent ending that some will find difficult to shake.