Sator

Sator

The clever thing about Sator is that Adam appears to have done exactly what sensible folk-horror advice would recommend: get away from the family, disappear into the woods and keep your distance from whatever ancient forest entity has been making everybody behave strangely.

Unfortunately, he has moved into Sator’s office.

Jordan Graham makes the forest feel less like somewhere Adam has retreated to than something he has voluntarily placed himself inside. The cabin never provides much protection. Its boards creak and settle, darkness gathers beyond the windows and the soundscape continually reminds us that the trees are still out there. Even indoors, the forest seems to be waiting on the other side of the wall.

More troublingly, Adam does not behave like somebody desperate to escape. He steals recordings of his grandmother talking about Sator, repeatedly plays them alone in the cabin and sets cameras among the trees. Hunting deer is the practical explanation. Yet the longer we watched, the harder it became not to wonder whether he is actually hunting for Sator.

That question becomes nastier when a terrified woman appears tied to a tree near his cabin. The film never helpfully supplies the missing scene. Did Sator’s followers bring her? Or did Adam, during some period he cannot remember, put her there himself? Her reaction when released makes the second possibility horribly persuasive. Sator is very good at leaving precisely enough missing that we have to investigate rather than merely receive the story.

Its strangeness is backed by extraordinary filmmaking. Graham gives the woodland genuine depth and texture, moves between colour, monochrome and rougher family footage, and allows major supernatural moments to arrive almost casually. A figure can be standing in the darkness before you realise you have been looking at it. A body can suddenly rise among the trees without the film turning around to congratulate itself.

Even the grandmoth...