Sator (2019)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com January 11, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

Mental illness or a monstrous force plaguing a family? Maybe some of both. It’s intriguing to watch it and decipher. The acting is good, and the scenery is amazing. There are long stretches without dialogue, and that only adds to the strangeness. It’s a good one overall.

Synopsis

We begin with an interview with an old woman who talks about Sator, who was in charge of everything. Old Nani writes her story, which includes some of the credits. The camera walks us through her creepy old candle-filled house. We cut to someone pouring gasoline on a body and igniting it. She then levitates above the flames.

Adam walks through the woods with his gun . He blows some kind of animal call whistle, but nothing shows up. He listens to a tape of Mother on tape, talking about Sator. “Everything that moves is his; he made a covenant of peace with the animals,” she says. He lives there in the cabin with his dog.

Pete walks in and drinks some moonshine. Pete’s got something “in his head” that he wants out. Adam watches video from his trail cams, but it doesn’t work. Pete thinks the card is messed up.

The two brothers go up to the big house to look through Grandfather’s stuff; maybe he had another memory card for the camera. We flash back to Pete and Nani talking about her failing memory. Evie talks to Adam, introducing herself, but he doesn’t speak.

We hear Mother on tape again, “When you summon Sator, he turns his attention to you. Trust him completely, you will be tested, for he is a consuming fire. After you have suffered a little while, he will refine— make you pure.” The dog growls at something in the darkness outside, and Adam sees a light in the deep woods.

The next morning, Adam retrieves the memory card from the camera and watches it. We see more flashbacks where Nani doesn’t recognize Pete. He talks to her about sensing spirits. She used to do automatic writing, and she has a guardian spirit— Sator. Pete can’t believe the old lady holds onto that story above all else.

Adam is using the wilderness cams to see if he can get an image of Sator out there. We hear that Evie was Pete’s wife before the accident. Adam still talks to Evie. She’s glad Pete made it out of the accident OK. She’s sorry about Adam’s mom, “Was anybody ever able to find her?” There are several mentions of Deborah, who seems to be Adam and Pete’s sister.

Adam finds a weird horned skull-headed thing sitting in his living room. Sator? Adam’s dog vanishes. Pete thinks that Grandpa Jim sacrificed himself so that Ma could be with Sator. We get another flashback to show that Mother had been obsessed with writings about Sator. Adam started acting weird about that time, getting all silent. Deborah asks if Adam talks to Sator, but he doesn’t respond.

Adam goes out at night with his shotgun, looking. He finds a woman tied to a tree; it’s Evie. She runs away, screams, and vanishes, seeming to get pulled into the sky by something.

More flashbacks to Deborah asking Nani about her automatic writing. She can’t even read her writing anymore. She would hear people talking in her head, so she just wrote it down. Deborah mentions that Grandpa Jim’s suspicious death put Pete into an institution, and he’s getting out today. Pete and Deborah argue about leaving Adam isolated up on the mountain, but she says he’s dangerous.

Time passes, and snow falls. We watch Evie stick Pete’s face in the fireplace and cut his throat. We get a flashback to Nani wandering off at night with Deborah outside, looking for her. A bald man/Evie grabs Deborah and chokes her to death, then douses her with gas and sets her on fire, which we saw in the pre-credit sequence.

Commentary

Insanity? Mass delusion? Actual monster? There are long stretches with no dialog, which adds to the sense of isolation and loneliness that Adam experiences out in the woods. The scenes where people talk are really well done, but there’s an awful lot of time where it’s just Adam doing stuff in the woods in the dark.

The scenery is awesome— I’d love to live there, even with a monster roaming the woods. The time jumps get confusing; some of the flashbacks are in black and white or in a different aspect ratio— but not all of them. It was sometimes hard to tell what was going on right now.

It’s very weird. I’m not sure I understood a lot of it. My understanding from reading the trivia is that the woman who played Nani was the director’s grandmother, and most of the interviews and stuff with her were real— she really believed in Sator and spent time in an institution because of it. I guess they made the rest of the film around that. Or at least that’s the story— it may just be the marketing spiel.