The Sacrament is a grim, grim movie, as befits the material. It posits a world where the 1978 Jonestown massacre never happened, so it can re-stage it, simplified and in a much smaller scale.
The movie presents itself as a Vice documentary following up on a letter received by one of its employees- Patrick (Kentucker Audley), a fashion photographer. In the letter his sister asks him to join her at Eden Parrish, some sort of religious utopic commune. When Patrick follows up and tries to get more information, he's informed that the Parrish has moved to a remote country, and they refuse to tell him where it is - they tell him that to see his sister he has to fly out to the unnamed country and go to an airstrip, where a helicopter will be waiting. Gulp.
So Vice (which, honestly, should be paying advertising fees to this movie, but it's a fun conceit) fly Patrick out to find his sister, with investigative reporter Sam (A.J. Bowden) and cameraman Jake (indie director Joe Swanberg) embedded to report on whatever the hell is going on.
When they arrive they find that the Parrish, which is set in the middle of the jungle (or as close to a jungle as Georgia, where the film was shot, can provide) have cleared out a few hectares and set up a compound with several cabins and a central meeting area for a hundred and something people; It's a pretty impressive setup. On a creepier note, a group of AK-toting gunmen are sent out to meet them.
But once inside everyone they talk to seems to be happy and thinks the world of the Parrish and Father (Gene Jones), the cult their spiritual leader, and Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) looks radiant and more together than she's been for a while. So the Vice crew, while sceptical, allow themselves to be somewhat won over by the commune.
Until the second act, where they discover things are not as paradisiacal as they seem (the Vice crew sub in for the real-life Ryan delegation, and the way they find out about the cult's nastier side is the same). So begins a tense search for more information and a series of face-offs with Father and his cronies, resulting in... well, a fact-inspired massacre that includes dozens of children, depicted in an unsensationalistic manner. You have been warned.
Until the second act, where they discover things are not as paradisiacal as they seem (the Vice crew sub in for the real-life Ryan delegation, and the way they find out about the cult's nastier side is the same). So begins a tense search for more information and a series of face-offs with Father and his cronies, resulting in... well, a fact-inspired massacre that includes dozens of children, depicted in an unsensationalistic manner. You have been warned.
The events have been changed - by necessity, as so much went on in Jonestown before shit went down that it'd take at least a miniseries (with a much bigger budget) to do a faithful dramatic depiction. For starters, the original massacre claimed more than nine hundred lives, not a hundred and sixty-odd. And there's all sorts of wrinkles- from attempted collusion with the soviet bloc to Father pulling off full-scale suicide dry runs before the main event that the movie never covers (the real Jones was much more openly unhinged than his cinematic counterpart, at least until his final scenes.) But for a fictionalized take, it's pretty close, taking all sorts of small details and weaving it into a thriller framework.
Writer/Director/Editor Ti West does a stellar job delivering an unflinching, genuinely upsetting slow-burn of a horror thriller. It's a good-looking movie, too, with a bright, polaroid-like color scheme (cinematographer: Eric Robbins) and a lot of the footage actually shot by Swanberg as he was acting the character.
West hasn't missed yet, and this is another strong entry in an extremely impressive run of very diverse films.
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