The Sacrament (2013)

This is basically a re-telling of the Jonestown Massacre, which, if anyone doesn't know, is a real event that happened in the late 1970's, when a megalomaniac by the name of Jim Jones brought several hundred members of a religious group called the People's Temple to a remote jungle location in Guyana.

After a small cadre of politicians arrived by a small private plane to respond to several requests from disillusioned members of the congregation, there suddenly was a desperate stampede by a number of the group to leave the compound. Jim Jones then ordered the guards to shoot the members who were attempting to leave, and gave the entire crowd each a cup of kool-aid laced with cyanide in a mass suicide.

The event was forgotten for many years, and has been dramatized in this film, which takes the original story and hams it up for the camera, by taking the stance of a "reality" show approach to the filming.

Unfortunately, the experiment fails to generate the sense of reality that the filmmakers were attempting to capture, and the feeling is much more forced rather than coming from a real event. Although it was a reasonably noble attempt to make a notorious situation somehow believable, by it's very nature, it is doomed. It would have been much more believable if the film were just shot as a normal film would be, without the extra layer of a "found footage" project.

Since the camera is always supposed to be running, there are moments in the film in which the actors have to look directly into the lens and explain that the camera is going to keep running "so that there is a record of whatever happens," which completely destroys any sense of the reality of the moment -- the idea of deliberately having a camera in someone's hand in each scene is so unbearably false that the viewer is immediately left wondering why on earth they even thought this technique would help to make the story seem "real." In fact, it does the exact opposite.

The use of the hand-held 'shaky cam' in almost every scene is utterly unmotivated -- in what would be the climax of the movie, the camera is so ridiculously present that it almost seems like SNL decided to take the idea and turn it into one of Andy Samberg's sarcastic short films, because they have used such a heavy-handed approach to the material.

In telling the story of Jonestown, nothing would have been needed other than to have just told the story as it unfolded without the addition of this added layer of "reality" -- and it would have been a much more superior film. This, sadly, destroys any chance of that happening.

The story of the People's Temple deserves better treatment than this, and, given a more experienced filmmaker, would have had a much deeper impact. I regret that we have lost that opportunity now, having seen this approach fail.