Sins of the Father

Color me thoroughly unsurprised that an arrogant, aggressive young man in his late teens who is in love with his own narcissistic "sensitivity" is actually some red pill dork that is going to kidnap his mom's lesbian friends' daughter and try to force her to join the sort of white supremacy cult that conservatives that dropped out of college talk about on the Internet. This entire movie is a metaphor for the alt-right, and it's well-written up to a certain point. I put up with the odious young man for an hour and fifteen minutes until he proved me right, simply wondering what the mystery was. You can skip this one unless you're a folk horror completist or some kind of radfem masochist. The boy is grotesquely hateable as a character from beginning to end. This isn't about "familial trauma" it's about patriarchal tribal garbage and dumb white guys who think they're vikings. In fact, the more I think about what is wrong with this movie and what is so annoying about the way the MAN is written is that he's infantalized as though he's a 12 year old. The young man is 18 possibly even 19 and no one is slapping him across the face or telling him to shut up when he yells about how great his violently abusive daddy was or when he gets uppity towards his mom's boyfriend. The entire flaw in the film is that his behavior is not excusable for a man his age, it would be more understandable in a 13 or 14 year old at most. No one punishes him or suspects him of being an intellectually deficient weirdo. ...except the audience? Bad writing.

Full disclosure: I had the opportunity to meet and work with the writer/cinematographer on a film I directed just recently...and I have to say, Sins of the Father is really well done! If you're looking for the film that underlines the sort of familial trauma and fear and doubt that goes along with literally killing your past in order to grow better for the future, this is the movie for you. Pleasant amounts of blood and gore throughout, to make any horror fan happy, the performances that really stood out to me are from David Michaeli and Anissa Eisenberg, in a cast full of relative unknowns, there's a lot riding on their shoulders to propel the film forward and give us someone to root for. Now, without getting too far into spoilers, I would say that the film suffers from any sort of "lawful good" character for us to identify with as an audience...and though that may be intentional, it sort of hampers us in the end the same way Midsommar did. The cross comparison to this as a Minnesotan version of Midsommar hardly hurts this film though...I actually fully enjoyed this more because of that visual/stylistic connection...for myself, I would have just enjoyed a positive character to root for that wasn't just a victim of the circumstances they were in...and that's my only real and honest critique. Otherwise, beautifully shot, lit and edited...you won't find the awful stock sounding indie mix that you might expect from a Gravitas release here, this one is rich and full and has done really well to integrate VFX shots and let the RED Helium shine. The visual style is very Ari Aster in composition, lighting and framing, and again that's not a dig, that's a good comparison where it works especially well for this type of story. Overall, very well made and dread filled film! Worth checking out, if for nothing else, to support your local indie filmmaker! -- also -- watch through the credits for a "bonus" scene.