But then things take a turn for the grotesque, and the hidden darkness of the apartment building comes to the forefront. Initially Alison’s neighbours seem, err, quirky, but otherwise amiable.
Winner slowly builds the atmosphere, establishing Alison’s insecurities and cruelly playing on them as the film progresses, and a host of creepy characters emerge from the woodwork.
You’d probably bust a nut like it’s the final round of the school yard conker battling contest. Imagining walking in on your crusty old father rolling around with a bevy of young prostitutes. And boy, through her flashbacks do we come realise why the woman is so damn neurotic. The Sentinel seeks to emulate Rosemary Baby‘s (1968) style of urban horror, with Alison tormented by the choking claustrophobic confines of the apartment suffering insomnia and nightmarish flashbacks to her suicide attempts. Alison finds herself a pawn in a very long running game of chess. Turns out that Alison’s apartment block is owned by the church and it is built over the very gateway of Hell. But the rent is reasonable and the apartment is nice, so she doesn’t mind too much. Despite lacking visual capabilities, this priest continually stares at Alison from atop the roof as though she’s a TV made out of tits. Eventually, she settles on a Gothic apartment building inhabited by a creepy blind priest ( John Carradine). The seventies, feminism, rejection of male dependency ingenious metaphor Mr Winner, have a gold star. Her boyfriend Michael ( Chris Sarandon) urges her to move into an apartment together but she’d rather find her own place. We follow model Alison ( Cristina Raines) who is looking to settle down in New York. However he knew how to direct an uncompromising thriller: with films like The Mechanic (1972) Scorpio (1973), and Death Wish (1974) to name a few. To the general British public, Winner will forever be known for those annoying early 2000’s “calm down, dear! It’s only a commercial!” adverts for Esure. The Sentinel is one of these Hell House movies in which the protagonist really should have read the fine print of their tenancy. Adapted from Jeffrey Konvitz‘s 1974 novel of the same name, this 1977 film was director Michael Winner‘s attempt to put the action-thriller behind him. A corrupted home serves as a deconstruction of our innate hopes and desires for a comfortable existence, and the fear becomes just that much more palpable. However, there’s a subset of this subgenre where the house also happens to be the goddamn gateway to Hell. It’s easy to see why this story template is so popular with filmmakers. Over the years, cinema has gotten a lot of mileage out of whole ‘dream home turns out to be haunted or possessed’ shtick.
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