Wednesday, January 27, 2021

The Sacrament: A Question Of Belief

 After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years...I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at what happens when a whole group of people decide to blindly follow someone who tells them exactly what they want to hear.

So, there’s this old, slightly hackneyed saying, that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Here’s the thing: It might be a cliché, but it’s also sometimes true. Whatever you can think up, some crazy motherfucker has probably done it, it’s just a matter of whether or not that particular rock has been turned over and exposed to the light of public attention. And an element of truth lends a certain bite to horror - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was billed as being “based on a true story,” though the connection’s so thin you could read a book through it. The Blair Witch Project was marketed as being an actual disappearance of three filmmakers, and that added something to the film (not that it needed it). It’s why found-footage films, when they’re good, are really good - if something feels true, we experience in a way different from what we know to be fiction.

And this is sort of what makes The Sacrament both compelling and frustrating. It’s a confection made of layers of truth and fiction. It’s well-paced and tense, largely believable (for good reason), but it also struggles enough with the line between truth (or realism) and fiction that it doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could.

It starts off as a conversation between Sam and Jake, journalists at Vice, an actual media outlet that got its start as a nightlife magazine for gentrifying hipsters in New York City, but over the years has moved closer to actual journalism. There’s still a sex-and-drugs streak in their subject matter, but it’s just as often about investigating conditions in impoverished areas as it is about going to far-off lands to do exotic hallucinogens.  Sam’s been all over the world covering all kinds of crazy stuff, and Jake is a photographer who mostly works in fashion but yearns to do something more substantive. As it turns out, Jake has just received a letter from his sister Caroline. Caroline was in sober living for awhile, then she dropped out of sight entirely. Now she’s written him to say how much she misses him and to invite him to Eden Parish, the commune she calls home. It’s not in the U.S., and Sam smells an opportunity - he’ll go with Jake and bring his cameraman Patrick along. They’ll document the siblings’ reunion and get a look at some crazy commune out in the jungle somewhere. It’s exactly the sort of thing Vice does.

And so after a long flight to somewhere unspecified in what might be either South American or Africa, Sam, Jake and Patrick take a helicopter out to Eden Parish. Heading up to the entrance, they are stopped by men carrying assault rifles. These men are not happy to see any of them, especially a cameraman. Caroline has to intervene before things get ugly. She didn’t know Sam and Patrick were coming, but it’s fine, really.

She’s sure Father won’t mind. 

I’ve watched enough features on Vice to know what they look like and how they typically go, and at least in the broad strokes this narrative conceit works fine, because in my experience, actual features on Vice often consist of young city hipsters with gonzo-journalism aspirations getting in over their heads, and that is exactly what happens here. And it’s entirely plausible that Vice would show something like this - a trip gone horribly, horribly wrong - warts and all, but if the broad strokes are convincing, it falls down in the details. The narrative mode is realism - we’re supposed to believe we’re watching an actual documentary made by a real-world media company - but the acting and writing betray that sense of realism. The dialogue tends to waver between the naturalistic, the expository, and the painfully on-the-nose, and though most of the characters are believably acted, there are a few that get close enough to cliché to break the conceit. As often as not, you’re aware that you’re watching actors acting, instead of journalists interviewing people who live in an agrarian commune, under the watchful eye of Father and men with guns. For every thing that makes it believable, there’s something to interrupt that sense of believability and it’s distracting. 

I don’t, however, know that it’s fatal to the film. It’s well-paced, turning up the tension gradually but inexorably, moving from quiet menace to bleak, unblinking horror over the second half of the film. The important characters aren’t caricatures and it does a pretty good job of resisting cliché (with one glaring exception). The motivations of the important characters feel largely realistic, there are some slightly abrupt changes of heart, but nothing jarring. At first, everything seems fine at Eden Parish - a little odd, and maybe their medical supplies aren’t great, and it's a little disconcerting to keep hearing Father’s voice coming out of loudspeakers all over the commune, but people seem happy. Then again, there’s the men with guns always just on the edge of the commune, and Father is as evasive as he is avuncular. He doesn’t want to talk about how Eden Parish was financed by the life savings of everyone there. And he knows maybe a little too much about Sam for someone who forbids his community to the use of phones, television, or the Internet. 

The arrival of visitors from the outside world is more disruptive than anyone expected, and as Sam, Jake and Patrick keep asking questions, fewer and fewer things add up, and then in the third act it all comes to a head in a manner that doesn’t let you look away, and even if the dialogue feels a little stagey, it’s still acted in a raw and confrontational way. There is one plot hole that leapt out at me at the end - a moment of “wait, how did they have that footage?” - but I know I’m pickier about that sort of thing than most people. It’s not found-footage, strictly speaking, more of a mockumentary, but anytime you present something as realism, you have to do everything you can to get the audience to believe they’re watching something real, and there are just enough moments that violate believability that the impact is diluted somewhat.

Something else that ends up being a bit of a problem is the degree to which these fictional people working for a real media company experience events that are a pretty thinly fictionalized version of real-world events. It’s not going to take long for anyone familiar with the story of Jonestown to figure out what’s happening and about to happen in this film. It’s not a direct beat-for-beat recreation, it’s scaled down to fit the story of these three journalists, but though some minor details are changed, the sequence and nature of events play out faithfully to what actually happened there. If anything, it’s less horrifying in scale than the actual events on which it’s based, and it’s still pretty horrifying in the final act. It’s a fictionalization of real events, presented as a documentary made by fictional people employed by a media company that actually exists. That’s a lot of conceit in one movie, and I think it didn’t quite commit enough to the idea of realism to really nail it. It doesn’t always come off believable, but knowing that it’s pretty faithful to something that actually happened does make it a sobering testimony to the dangers of belief, to what happens when a bunch of people decide to put all of their faith, their money, and their lives in the hands of a man who seeks to create a world that revolves entirely around him.  

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