Either the characters in The Sacrament are supposed to be outrageously stupid, or we are. Possibly both. One way or the other, the filmmakers unquestionably are. Hailed by a small, strange group as a new American horror maestro in cinema, Ti West here stumbles over his self-importance once again, spilling the shady secrets of his moviemaking model for all to see, if they so wish. I wish I hadn't seen. A shameless swipe from numerous horror projects of recent years, The Sacrament is hollow exploitation for every pretentious frame of its runtime, sealed off with an egregious claim to authenticity that it surely cannot expect any one of its viewers to believe. It's the callousness of such a gambit, combined with the glaring inconsistencies and improbabilities in the found footage conceit's application here, and then with the skin-crawlingly bad acting and writing - not even B-movie bad, due to the relentless straining for gravitas - that makes The Sacrament not only bad filmmaking, but a bad idea in the first place. You won't believe it for a second, and you won't believe how awful that filmmaking actually can get. Dialogue like this wouldn't be pardonable even if West wasn't aiming for documentary realism, while acting like AJ Bowen's wouldn't be pardonable even if you were blind, deaf and unconscious. Only Gene Jones, whose derivative character isn't half as interesting as West thinks, but is nevertheless twice as interesting as the rest of the film, and Amy Seimetz register positively. There's some semblance of intelligence in the initial setup, and an underlying tension, before West loses the plot (and continuity) in the second half, though even these are mitigated by the flagrant obviousness of every minor motion in this outrageously stupid film.
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