The production team behind the tepid, wholly predictable horror pastiche of The Sinners calls into question the old adage “good artists copy, but great artists steal”: in this case, The Sinners must be what happens when you both “copy” and “steal” but do each very badly.
The premise here harks back not only to 1996’s The Craft but also to David Fincher’s corrosive 1995 masterpiece Seven: only this time the seven deadly sins are embodied by a coven of seven grating middle-class teenage schoolgirls, ostensibly led by pastor’s daughter Grace Carver (Kaitlyn Bernard), whose extra-curricular activities are formed around their supposed adherence to the specific character traits that prompt their categorization as one of the sins.
They all attend some sort of strict Bible school in the middle of a backwater town that’s even more reactionary and conservative than the one Kevin Bacon atheistically boogied all over back in Footloose.
Not surprisingly the whole deadly sin theme is taken up by the girls as a secret way of rebelling against their Christian fundamentalist upbringings. But the trouble really begins when the deadly sin clique singles out one of the troupe members, Aubrey (Brenna Llewellyn), for flouting the rules of the group by writing about all this in her journal. Aubrey gets cruelly bullied by the others but manages to mysteriously escape into the woods. One by one the other members of the sinners' clique begin turning up dead—all with the calling card of a red rose stuck in their mouths. Once this chain of events is set off, it’s not really difficult to guess who’s behind the killings.
Along with the aforementioned blatantly obvious cinematic references, there’s also the tired trope of the bumbling local bucolic cops with folksy hearts and not much in their heads. The Sinners also commits the sin of having its murder victims be thoroughly unsympathetic characters to start with, so once they begin biting the dust in the film, the deaths hardly seem tragic.
Where the script here really fails, however, is its woeful lack of tension: even the most simplistic 1980s slasher flick (take the first Friday the 13th, for example) knew to insert “red herring” characters in its whodunit narrative to lead audiences away from the character ultimately responsible for the murders. The Sinners, sadly, makes no real attempt at building much suspense into what is a sadly tepid, talky murder mystery. Not Recommended.