You’re sitting in a pitch-black forest. You can see nothing except for a blazing fire in the distance. You are frozen in fear as a creeping sense of dread washes over your body. No matter what you do, you can’t escape the feeling that someone is watching you. Take that extreme discomfort and you have Jordan Graham’s feature film debut Sator.
Adam (Gabriel Nicholson) lives in a secluded part of his family’s farm. He and his dog spend their days wandering the vast woods, weaving through the trees as if searching for something. At night, Adam listens to a voice groan about a figure called Sator. It is slowly revealed that Sator has been haunting Adam’s family for years, affecting both his grandmother and mom. As the entity creeps ever closer, Adam begins to unravel.
Sator is more than just a horror story; it is a recounting of Graham’s past. Sator was a real entity that haunted his family for generations, a spectre of mental illness that permeated his childhood. Graham utilizes personal home videos and voice recordings in Sator that entwine fact with fiction, blurring the lines of reality and creating an intimate horror creation.
Graham demarcates the fictional and real footage with his use of color. While Adam is in his cabin, greens and browns saturate the landscape. Then, when he joins his brother Pete to visit their grandmother, the film switches to Graham’s own black-and-white 8mm footage documenting his family’s illnesses. In fact, this use of family home videos blends found footage techniques with a more traditional filmmaking format. Found footage horror is the capturing of horrific past events instead of something that can be stopped. The raw footage reveals a disturbing truth, which is also the case in Sator. The raw, hand-held video clips, filmed by Graham himself, look into the past when he found his mother yelling about Sator and his grandmother staring blankly into space while sitting straight up in bed. These sequences reveal the truth of his family and just how much Sator is steeped into his family history.
The film moves slowly, plopping the audience into the middle of a generations-long story. Instead of dumping exposition into the script, characters talk about past events without any context, such as a mysterious accident and the sudden disappearance of their mother. Such dialogue creates a sense of intimacy between film and viewer; they are treated as if they are part of the family.
Graham’s cinematography relishes in long wide takes of the forest, dwarfing Adam in relation to the expanse of trees. The forest becomes menacing, as if they have come alive and are watching his every move. There are long stretches without dialogue, relying on Nicholson’s physical movement and dramatic lighting to build tension and a pervasive sense of loneliness.
While it takes a little while to finally put the pieces together about what is happening, shocking and graphic acts of violence happen in quick succession. While such a tonal shift can often be jarring, it feels perfect in this context. Now that the truth has been revealed, Hell is finally unleashed, a release from Sator’s slowly building sense of anxiety.
Sator is more than a film; it’s a gorgeous and haunting experience. No words can truly do justice to this film and what it feels like to watch it. This is the movie that A24 has always wanted to make, rivaling their much-loved films The VVitch, Hereditary, and Midsommar. Put on those noise-cancelling headphones, turn off the lights, and get ready to float through a lush nightmare.
