Sator — Sator (Blu Ray)

Sator is a deeply stark and very slow-burning folk horror film set in the evergreen forests surrounding the Santa Cruz mountains. It’s a film featuring minimal often mumbled/ barely heard dialogue blended with brooding and moody shots of woodland and flickering candle-lite cabins. It feels like the film Bela Tarr might have made if he’d moved to the states, went off-the-grid, and got obsessed with a local malevolent forest-bound entity. Here from the folks at Cauldron Films is a Blu-Ray release of the film, featuring a director’s commentary and a short making of.

Made in 2019 Sator was the third feature-length film from Jordan Graham- who before this had made the fantasy mystery Spirit Link (2009), and supernatural thriller Spectre (2012).  Graham both wrote and directed Sator, which drew from the memories of his own grandmother’s real-life belief in a protective spirit. The film very much sits in deliberately slow-paced art house horror territory- and while at times the glum crawl of the whole thing does become trying in places, there is something rather compelling and haunting about the film.

The opens in monochrome- with an elderly woman talking about Sator- an entity that has spoken to her in her thoughts most of her life, then we get hand-scribbled credits written by an ageing hand. When we get into the film we meet a glumly bearded man, who we later find out is named Adam (Gabriel Nicholson). He spends his time in a very isolated cabin in the middle of the woods, with just himself and his dog. He spends his days roaming the woodland, and keeps checking his deer cam for something.

As the film unfolds, we find out Jim is part of a family who have been torn apart by the death of his grandfather. Jim had somewhat of a breakdown, moving deeper into the woods away from the rest of the family who lives in their own cabin. In the family, there’s the bushy-bearded and aviator-style glasses-wearing Pete (Michael Daniel), his nanna (June Peterson) who creates automatic writing, and a brash 30-something sister. All of the family seemingly have some form of contact/ belief in Sator- a tall animal fur-covered figure with an animal skull face and bone talons. As Adam is deep in the wilds, he is seemingly the most in contact with the entity, or of course, he could be going well and truly mad- and the film(largely) leaves this up to the watcher.

The film runs around one hour and twenty-five minutes, but feels easily around the two-hour mark- as the whole thing crawls along, with mumbled dialogue, long shots of the woodland, and obsessive to brooding figures hunched in cabins. Towards the end of the film, we get sudden and lurching moments of gory violence. I’d say you most certainly have to be ready for a grim and arty ride of film- which at times may well try your patience, but do stay with it, as if you enjoy bleak tone studies edged with nature-focused dread & foreboding- Sator will appeal.

 

Moving onto this region free Blu-Ray. And on the extras side, we get a wonderfully in-depth & truly fascinating commentary track from the film's director/creator Jordan Graham. He opens by detailing the equipment he made the film with, moving on to discuss the in-between the credits candle-lite room scenes/ how he created the levitation scene. He talks about how he funded the film, and that it took a year and four months to create/ add in the sound design elements after the filming was finished. He discusses how he made the film's broodily minimal soundtrack and gives sonic examples of the different textures/tones utilized. He discusses the set design of the cabin, and how he mainly built the cabin himself. He chats about some of the more isolated locations, and the issues they faced with them. He talks about how none of his grandmother's lines were scripted, so he had the build plot elements around this, which was very time-consuming. Later on, he discusses how he wanted to create the feeling of dread/ unease with just very subtle elements, and how he did this. We find out four people wore the creature's costume- and how he wanted to keep how much it was seen down to a minimum.  He talks about The Blair Witch Project being one of the key influences on the film,  how the lead actress got pregnant and gave birth twice during the time it took to make the film, and much more. A really wonderful track, which gives a great insight into modern indie filmmaking. 
Otherwise, on the extras side we get a few minutes making off, which shows Graham building the cabin and filming inside it- this again is interesting, though it does rather ruin some of the films set-up, so definitely something to watch after you’ve played the film. And we lastly get a trailer for the film too.

 

Sator certainly won’t be a film for everyone- and you’ve really got to have a penchant for very slow-burn arthouse horror for it truly to click with you. There is no doubt I’ll be keeping a close eye out for future work from Mr Graham, as he certainly is a skilful filmmaker with a highly brooding and thoughtful focus.