Direction: Jordan Graham
Country: USA
Sator is an art-house horror movie that impressed me more with its imagery than with its story. Written and directed by Jordan Graham, who sought inspiration in his own great-grandmother experiences, the film follows Adam (Gabriel Nicholson), a tortured man who lives in a cabin in a secluded forest where a supernatural entity - a demon called Sator - claims all members of his family as he stalks his lineage for centuries. His senile grandmother, Nani (remarkable first appearance on the screen by June Peterson), a practitioner of automatic writing, is the one who informs him about the knowledgeable creature that can’t be seen in the dark and talks in her head. While the alert Adam seems disturbed with the fact, his siblings, Pete (Michael Daniel) and Deborah (Aurora Lowe), don’t show any signs of weakness.
Posing as an enigmatic, folklore-infused chimera, Sator is not a typical scarer as it detaches from all those stereotyped elements such as punctual startles, sudden loud noises, creepy visuals and foreboding score. Instead, Graham frames his shots with two different techniques (B&W 4:3 and Color 16:9), employs occasionally ruminative soundscapes and routine Bible passages that come from a radio, and throws in Rachmaninoff’s “Concerto no. 2” in the most sinister moments of the film. Yes, I thought the grandmother was far more bone-chilling than Sator itself.
Even so, the slow-moving passages and dull dialogue make the film drag all along, while the outcome never matches the promises made in the first segment of the story. This self-reverential exercise drowns in a deep melancholy and gets lost in the vision of bovine-like skulls risen from the dead.
