‘Every once in a while I wake up in the night and he’s there…’
Due to the nature of fear, horror can get away with being a bit avant garde and opaque because the unknown is one of the things that frightens us the most. A single mystifying scene can cause a chill to slink down your spine if shot right, and occasionally (see Possum), this can render the need for a coherent plot pretty much needless. If a filmmaker can create an atmosphere that grabs your heart with its inky fingers and squeezes until you can no longer breathe, it doesn’t really matter what they haven’t done so well. That’s what will stick with you when the credits finally roll and the iron grip is relinquished. Based on some of the rave reviews that Sator has received elsewhere, it is clear that Jordan Graham’s folk horror movie had this effect on some people. Alas, dear reader, I was not one of them…
Adam (Gabriel Nicholson) and Pete (Michael Daniel) move between a series of secluded cabins in a desolate forest, haunted by the ghosts of the past and by a strange, supernatural being known as Sator.
Sator is one of those movies where the backstory is actually more interesting than the film itself. Finally released in 2021 following a gestation period of 7 years, Graham’s passion project also stars his real life grandmother June Peterson as the matriarch of the strange family at the heart of Sator. The fact that she genuinely believed in the eponymous, supernatural being, coupled with her death mere months before the film was released, adds an extra layer of intrigue to the whole thing.
Having said that, the bottom line for this kind of film is that if it isn’t coherent, and it isn’t compelling, then it must at least be frightening. Sator flirts with all three of those stages of being without ever really committing to any of them. A well made film sure, and one that contains a number of imaginative ideas, but also a film that flatters to deceive and is never really more than the sum of its parts. A gentle failure.