Sinister 2 (2015)

Sinister 2 arrives as the second installment in a franchise about a pagan deity named Bughuul who persuades children to murder their families and film the results. Ciarán Foy directs with the grim professionalism of a man delivering a package he did not pack. James Ransone returns as the nameless former deputy, now a private investigator, and Shannyn Sossamon plays Courtney, a mother hiding from an abusive husband in a farmhouse marked for death. The film is competent and grim and almost entirely without ambition beyond the next jump scare, which it deploys with the persistence of a doorbell that will not stop ringing.

The cast includes a Black actor, John Beasley, as a professor who explains the occult rules, and a woman in the lead, but neither presence is offered as a statement of anything. They occupy their roles the way furniture occupies a room. Race goes unmentioned. No character's sexuality is examined. The environment is not a concern, the antagonist being a demon, not industry. Courtney's arc as a battered wife grants her sympathy, though she spends most of the running time being rescued by the deputy, which keeps the material inside the conventions of the genre as they stood in 2015.

The film offers mythology, delivered as rules and mechanics. The exposition about ritual sacrifice, missing children, and artwork of Bughuul is plot plumbing, not moral instruction. Nobody is told how to live. The bodies on the scarecrow posts exist for spectacle, not for advocacy. This is a slapdash sequel to a modest hit, reviewed poorly and forgotten quickly, and it carries no discernible cultural program. A viewer seeking progressive sensibilities in the murder of a family by its own child will come away empty. The score reflects that absence, which is total.