The 2012 film Sinister introduced the Bughuul, a freaky boogeyman who feasts on young children, inciting them to murder their families while filming themselves doing the deed. In the film, Ethan Hawke played a successful true-crime writer who moved his family into a house that was the scene of one of those murders then became the target of the Bughuul after he began investigating how the various cases were related. Hawke and family were murdered by his daughter at the end of the first film, but the Bughuul lives on in the new film Sinister 2. Though the sequel works hard to further develop the franchise’s mythology — attempting to define the Bughuul’s personality and exploring the inner lives of the children he’s claimed — it never really succeeds as a horror film. But it’s not all bad.
Sinister 2 stars James Ransone (reprising his role from the first film, where he was a deputy aiding Hawke in his investigation) as a private investigator who spends most of his time tracking cases that seem to be related to the Bughuul. When a family moves into a house where a Bughuul murder has claimed the previous occupants, the new family becomes part of the chain and the next victims — but only once they move to a new home. In order to prevent any more families from being murdered, Ransone’s character (after two films, he’s still never given a name) is locating those houses where Bughuul murders have taken place and burning them to the ground before anyone else can move in, hoping to break the chain. Arriving at the latest house, however, the investigator is surprised to find it already occupied by Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) and her young sons Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan), who are on the run from Courtney’s abusive husband (Lea Coco). Soon enough, the investigator must help them fend off not only the Bughuul — who has already begun communicating with Dylan — but also a violent man with powerful political connections.
I’ll get this part out of the way now — if you go into this film anticipating a tonal sequel to Sinister, you will be disappointed. The horror-movie elements of this film don’t all work. The “scary” parts of the film amount to numerous jump scares that exist only for the most superficially startling of reactions and have very little pay-off. Mr. Boogie himself, despite efforts to explore what motivates him, is a blank threat who just stands there with a very scary-looking face but who never speaks and doesn’t actually do anything more frightening than place his claw-like fingers on children’s shoulders. Then there’s the atrocious cliché ending, an artless and infuriating scene that represents all the worst tendencies of Hollywood horror movie franchises. (I will credit the film for doing such great work with the low-quality snuff films that the ghost children shot of the murders they committed. Depicting bodies arranged in beautiful/horrifying tableaux and murders being committed in grotesque but creative ways, this footage is extraordinarily eerie and haunting and among the film’s greatest achievements.)
The film’s biggest flaw, however, is its depiction of the ghost children, the kids whom Bughuul has already claimed after having them murder their families. Sinister 2 attempts to illuminate what the experience of being in such a position is like for these children, and there are frequent scenes in which the various children interact with Dylan and Zach — but, instead of deepening the mythology or enlightening viewers about the politics of being a Bughuul Child, these sequences are nothing but irritating; these are some real whiny brats we’re talking about. The filmmakers have said that this film is intended as a homage to Children of the Corn — in addition to featuring a group of creepy patricidal children, Sinister 2 takes place at a rural cottage located next to a cornfield. They’ve clearly made some errors along the way, however, not just in terms of writing but also with their casting choices: the actors playing these ghost children are each about as convincing as the third-best performer in an elementary school theatre production of Hamlet.
All this being said, condemning Sinister 2 entirely because of the weaknesses of its horror content would be unfairly dismissive of a film that is also an engrossing domestic drama. So many films (especially those financed in Hollywood, and especially horror sequels) suffer from underdeveloped characters with very little distinction in their personalities. In so many cases, characters don’t exist as human beings whose hopes and fears and goals drive the narrative but rather as plot devices that behave in whatever way the screenplay needs them to. Sinister 2, however, is a film that cares deeply about its character-based storytelling. The investigator and the Collins family are complex, nuanced people whom I really cared about and enjoyed spending time with — and how often can you say that about a big-studio summer film?
Ransone takes his minor role from the first film and clearly relishes finding the layers and humour and humanity within it that the previous installment never afforded him (despite the character’s frustrating ongoing namelessness). Sossamon, in particular, shines as a woman who is beginning to reclaim her strength and agency after years spent in domestic abuse. Sossoman, for whatever reason, never quite became the movie star that early roles in A Knight’s Tale and The Rules of Attraction seemed to promise, though she’s been doing good work on television in recent years on series like Mistresses and Wayward Pines. It’s great to see her here in a complex film role. The Sloan boys (who, in real life, are two-thirds of a set of triplets) are both very natural as brothers who could not be more different from each other. Even Coco, who is playing a much more stock role here, is so charismatic and terrifying in his few scenes that he adds much more depth to his portrayal of Clint Collins than we’d normally get from this type of character. Perhaps the highest praise I can give to the characters in Sinister 2 is that they seem so real to me; I can imagine them as actual people who continue to live their lives even when not on screen, and I would want to spend time with them again.
In nearly every way, Sinister 2 is a completely different film from its predecessor. And it’s not even like someone new took the franchise over and dramatically shifted gears — Sinister screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill both returned to write this sequel. Derrickson also directed the first film, though he’s handed the reins over to Ciarán Foy (Citadel) for this one (he remains on-board as a producer). I know that a lot of people will hate this film for having such a vastly different tone from the last one, and also for its undeniable flaws with the scary stuff. But there’s a lot here to like — if we were to remove all the horror-movie elements and focused just on the domestic drama, this would likely be an even better film. Ultimately, sure, Sinister 2 is a frustrating film with far too many flaws. But any sequel that works this hard to avoid just rehashing its predecessor deserves to be applauded.
