In short: Sator (2019)

A handful of characters we will eventually realize are a family live separately in some deep and dark, desolate Appalachian forest and mountain snowscape. Talk and thoughts when the characters meet tend to turn to a figure named Sator that has apparently been in contact with – or hounding – the family since the time of their grandmother (June Peterson, the actual grandmother of the director, who indeed spoke with an entity she called Sator during schizophrenic episodes) who talks about something that only ever feels dreadful and horrifying as if it were her guardian angel.

Mental states become increasingly frayed as Sator’s influence seems to grow; rituals are committed; things end very badly indeed.

Jordan Graham’s Sator is a film that is bound to divide any given audience. If you go in insisting on a clear and obvious narrative throughline, contemporary ideas about streamlined pacing or even just a clear adherence to what are becoming the rules of folk horror, this might very well be a film that’ll simply infuriate you, or at least bore you to tears.

I felt pretty much in awe of Sator watching it, basically hypnotized by its use of slowness, its thick and deep mood of dread, desperation and doom (so thick it’ll turn anyone into Stan Lee, apparently), the seemingly random but actually deeply meaningful shifts in style. Parts of the film look and feel as if you were watching a very weird family documentary (which you sort of do at that point), others have an indie horror style sense of the poetry of long lingering shots of dark and lonely places. It’s beautiful if you have the patience for it, coming to a point where the presentation of a ritual through a movie feels as if it were part of the ritual itself, putting the viewer in the position of a witness to something that probably should not be witnessed at all. Thanks to the actual family connections of the tale to its director, the film is also deeply personal, turning something that must have caused deep rifts in an actual family into a thing of myth and awe, always avoiding the temptation to turn this into some kind of afterschool special.

There is something genuinely haunting about Sator, a quality that is certainly caused by very thought-through and careful filmmaking (the film is making so much out of a miniscule budget, it’s nearly unbelievable), yet still feels like it were part of some sort of folk magic, letting the viewer commune with the sort of things Man Wasn’t Meant to Know (hi, HPL!). Not to get coarse, but it’s impressive as fuck.