Monday, June 16, 2025

Jack Hessler | Sacrament / 2024

love or punishment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Hessler (screenwriter and director) Sacrament / 2024 [9.14 minutes]

 

Jack Hessler’s 2024 film Sacrament is set in the mountainous American west in the 1950s, but in some respects it might be a story that could take place still today.

     Two young men, Belford (Rin Iverson), a black man (which was still an issue in the 1950s) and a white man, Winston (Abel Benitez), both church-goers, have fallen in love with the express intention of putting that love in practice on their camping trip.

     They do so, in fact, but at great cost for Belford, still a devout believer, still filled with notions of demons possessing him and God punishing him for his acts.    


      Beyond their verbal arguments in which Belford is resentful about Winston’s more open viewpoints about their love, Belford keeps thinking back of the first time he caught Winston’s eye in church, an image that clearly haunts him.

    The most important thing in this exceptional short film is cinematographer Kai Czarnowski’s startlingly rich black-and-white photography, which reminds one of the beauty of the noirs and best of the early filmmaking. Critic Simon Thompson describes the film’s look and feeling as being akin to:

 

“….what would happen if George A Romero, FW Murnau, and David Lynch were all put on the same final year project together. The crisp black and white cinematographer is strongly reminiscent of Romero’s Night of The Living Dead, with the constant off-kilter imagery being a strongly Lynchian trait, and the prevailing sense of doom and menace bringing to mind Murnau’s Nosferatu and The Last Laugh."



     Director Hessler and Czarnowski’s compositions, along with the heightened music of Joshua Quigley drive this film in the direction of a thriller, depending upon how you interpret their images and the significance of them.   


      After their sexual encounter, Belford becomes obsessed with what he feels is evil and he finally get ups, lantern in hand, leaves their tent, and goes into the woods to pray. When he returns to the tent, Winston is missing. Belford rushes to a clearing, evidently, where he observes Winston being beaten before he is put upon a cross which is soon after set on fire, obviously incinerating his lover.

    The commentator for Dekkoo, the site where I saw this film, interprets it all to be Belford’s nightmare.

      Yet, there remains a true possibility that Belford, himself, may have done his lover some harm. Certainly, we cannot imagine him building a cross and, with demons, watching the fire he has set; yet we must certainly wonder whether or not he has done in Winston.

      It all depends, I suggest, upon whether or not you see the work as a progressive narrative, a linear story in which first Belford goes into the woods to pray before he encounters his lover’s death, or whether we perceive this fraught tale as a mix of narrative, imagination, and flashback, which allows us to wonder whether Belford’s prayers occur after some terrible incident with Winston.

      Hessler makes certain we cannot quite know what we are witnessing—nightmare, fantasy, or exaggerated memory—but we recognize that despite Belford perceiving his friend as both a kind of Christ on the cross and martyred saint, that with the hold his religious teachings still have over him, Belford will never be able to enter into a full relationship with Winston, and even if it is just rejection, that Winston will have to suffer the consequences.

       This short work is so eerie and beautifully filmed that it makes us conscious, once again, of just how amateur-looking and trite of plot most LGBTQ films have become. 

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).      

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