Sinister (2012)

“Sinister” (2012)  Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance

Rated R for disturbing violent images (Lots of them. Snuff films and stuff. Geuagh.)

            My friends love me. They really do.  Moments like this one are not an indication that they dislike me in any fashion. When I say “challenge me,” they love me enough to actually challenge me. 

            So it was two days after I moved “Crosses In the Window Panes” onto Facebook and started sharing my reviews that my best friends brought over this movie and said “Okay, Mindy… find the message in this one.”  We watched it together, my two best friends and my husband, wracking our brains for the spiritual lesson to be learned.

Quick plot synopsis:

            Ellison Oswalt is a true crime author with a few books under his belt, one of which, quite a while ago, was a success.  He purposefully moves his wife, son and daughter into a house where an entire family was horribly killed and a child has gone missing to inspire what he hopes will be his next big hit true crime novel. Perhaps he’ll even discover the whereabouts of the missing child and get to be a hero on national television again. Unfortunately, he discovers through the course of his investigation that there is something more than murder to the crimes that happened in his new home. The deeper his digs, the more disturbing and supernatural the story becomes until he and his family are hopelessly entangled in it.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

            We can all see the problem right from the beginning.  This is a man who protests to be searching for a missing child, trying to uncover what the police overlooked in their investigation to solve an unsolved crime. To do his part for justice and right. But every night before he goes to bed, he pours a whiskey, pulls out one of several VHS tapes of interviews about his bestseller and watches himself boast about his exploits to an invisible interviewer.  He ignores his wife’s pleas for stability and threats of separation, his son’s increasingly troubling night terrors, and the ever-more intricate and graphic wall paintings in his daughter’s room because he needs to focus on the investigation. But he makes time for those interviews.

            "I'm going to write the best book that anybody's ever read."

            Early in the move, Ellison finds a box in the attic containing film strips and a projector. His defining character illustration happens when he realizes that he has first person film evidence of not only the murder that took place at the house, but also several other more graphic murders, spanning back over the decades.  He dials the number of the Sherriff’s office on his phone to report the find, but his eyes fall on several copies of his bestselling novel, and he hangs up.

“Do you understand what you've done this time? The kind of jeopardy you've put your children in? Your marriage? Is there anything you won't do for your [bleeping] book?!” Ellison’s Wife

            Later in the movie, after Mr. Oswalt has already mired himself and his family in the supernatural murders, the family moves back to their previous unsold residence, and we get a peek at the life that Ellison was trying to recapture as we see his beautiful sprawling mansion.

“I have always supported you doing what you love, Ellison. But writing isn't  the meaning of your life. You and me, right here, this marriage: that's the meaning of your life. And your legacy? That's Ashley and Trevor. Your kids are your legacy.”

            So the message comes to us from something that all four Gospels agree that Jesus said.  “He that tries to save his life will lose it.”  Sometimes it says “He who tries to secure his life,” or “he who tries to preserve his life.”  The wording only changes the meaning a little bit. The point, in context, is clear. Because the next thing that Jesus says is “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” 

            So the warning is very simple. When we focus on holding on to what we have, we lose everything.

            Now, in watching this movie, one might suspect that the moment that Mr. Oswalt lost everything was when his daughter hacked him to pieces with an axe.  

            "Don't worry Daddy... I'll make you famous again."

But actually, the moment came much sooner. Actually, it happened before the movie started.  In a confrontation only a few minutes into the movie, the Sherriff tries to tell Ellison that he liked the first book, written years before. But in the books that followed, the author had gotten too many things wrong and guilty parties had been allowed to go free as a result.  Our Mr. Oswalt lost the life he was trying to get back long before he started this leg of the story. 

I don’t think very many of us are in the position of having to worry that if we spend too much time reliving the glory days, we will be brutally murdered by our youngest children.  (At least I hope not, but I am eyeing my 8-year old suspiciously as I am composing this review.) 

But if you take that scene in a metaphoric light, if we don’t let those days go, and focus on the ones that we are living right now, our children (or any of the things that we have created) will, in some way shape or form, force us to refocus.  Even if they have to tear us apart to do so. 

Our lives are a gift. They do not belong to us, so we cannot hold on to them by any act of desperation or bargaining. And the more we tighten our grip, the more star systems will slip through our fingers.