Review: Sinful

Director: Rich Mallery

Screenplay: Rich Mallery

Year: 2020

After committing a crime, Remy and Salem find refuge inside a house. Remy’s paranoid increases as time goes by, aggravated by drugs’ use, and it starts affecting her relationship with Salem. The more time they spend inside the house, the stranger their surroundings become as well as the things that begin happening inside.

“Sinful” is a micro-budget thriller film from director Rich Mallery ("Holy Terror"). In it, he presents us with a female couple, Remy (Christina Lo, "The Black String") and Salem (Nicole D' Angelo, "Heartbeat"), in whom, because of budgetary reasons, the weight of the movie falls upon. As expected, the story takes place almost entirely inside the house. 

In this sort of movie with such tight budgets, the script and the acting, along with some creativity, play a crucial role in its success. On the acting side, both actresses do a good job of keeping the viewer interested in their couple dynamics, as well as in the situation they are living, although in parts they show their limitations in this art. In particular, Lo, whose characters go through more facets, is who stands out in both extremes. 

The plot on Mallery’s script is good and holds some unexpected twists and turns, but it can become a bit confusing. In his intention for hiding the plot twist, some plot holes are created that make it hard to follow through. Still, nothing that will prevent you from understanding what is going one once the twist is revealed.

Where “Sinful” fails is in the creativity part. During the whole movie, there is plenty of effort to develop the characters and the mystery surrounding them, emphasizing the twist that takes place in the third act, but in the end, it presents nothing that we haven’t seen before. The characters, the plot, and even the scenes targeted to a male audience lack that creative factor to distinguish it from the rest of the movies in its category.

“Sinful” is a microbudget thriller that puts most of its efforts into developing its characters and their surroundings, betting hard on its final twist. The twist, undoubtfully, fulfills its purpose, but at the same time, it creates some minor issues in the plot structure. Its main problem resides in that it doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before, and this lack of creativity ends up playing against it.