THE SINNERS: DTMWaGL #43

In which we don't learn what happens to the wolf

Hello friends! Most of the time, I select the movies for this newsletter carefully and with much consideration. Did I just do a nanny movie? Okay then I can’t watch this nanny movie, put it on the list for later. Hmm this one sounds good, but it boils down to “captive woman” again. THE SINNERS though, I picked out in about thirty seconds because I had people over and I thought, “oh let’s watch a Lifetime movie, it’ll be fun, I don’t have to write about every movie I watch.” And then we watched it and oh no actually I do have to write about this wildly overstuffed, blisteringly nonsensical teen religious psychosexual drama. (Content warnings for murder, torture, kidnapping, religious trauma, and excessive subplots. Also this is gonna break your email, click on the title.)

Sure, THE SINNERS is a weird movie (and it is not A Lifetime Movie but rather A Movie Acquired By Lifetime), but it still has an in medias res opening that we’ll get back to later. A red-haired teenage girl in a school uniform kneels in prayer and is set upon and kidnapped by six other teenage girls wearing animal and harlequin masks. The redhead gets to do a voiceover for the whole movie, and boy does she take advantage of this privilege. She tells us it’s “the summer of her life,” and she reads us “Corinthians 13:4” (if she was really a Jesus freak she would have said “First Corinthians” but that’s on the screenwriter, not the redhead), which you definitely have heard at a cousin’s wedding: love is patient, love is kind, love etc. But then she goes on that this isn’t a story about love, or truth. This is a story about sin. I can see why she chose the passage she did, the Bible doesn’t address sin at all. Anyway, this is Aubrey Miller, and she’s going to tell us how her body ended up at the bottom of a lake. She really, really is.

Aubrey introduces us first to Grace Carver, an ethereal blonde and the pastor’s daughter, as she’s picked up for school by her friiieeend Tori. Tori asks Grace about the guy she’s been dating, Kit, and Grace declares they’re over. As the rest of the class shows up at school, in their black jumpers and white button-downs and knee socks, Aubrey tonelessly offers to explain the deal with this group of girls who will kidnap her about 30 minutes from now. “We are The Sins,” she says, and the press kit and IMDb page and reviews of this movie and actual text of this movie really differ on what exactly that means, but I will do my best to relay it.

So: here are The Sins getting ready for class in the girls’ room, please picture them bouncing into frame like Rebecca Bunch’s friends that she definitely has. These are Aubrey’s friends and future kidnappers: Katie, greed, who came to school in a new black BMW today because she told her daddy she was sick of the white one; Stacey, envy, because she wants everything her best friend Katie has; Robyn, sloth, because everything comes easy to her, including some Division I athletic scholarships (for what sport? don’t worry about it); Molly, gluttony, because she eats one single Funyun before class and is maybe a size 2 to the other girls’ size 0 (also, it must be said, the actress playing Molly looks my age, and I am not in high school, maybe she’s drinking too much aging juice).

Left to right: Grace, Tori, Robyn, Stacey, fyi.

Those are the side players, but the stars are Tori, Grace, and Aubrey herself. Aubrey grimly informs us that she doesn’t hate anyone, of course, the Lord tells us not to hate, but fuck it, she hates Tori, who has been assigned the sin of wrath. “She’s emo, as you can see,” says Aubrey. Ah! Yes, I can see that, she’s got eyeliner like the girl from Paramore, my favorite emo band. Grace is lust, which was unfair since she’s actually a virgin, but once they were dubbed The Sins, everything changed, “including her sexuality.” By this, Aubrey means that sometimes Grace and Tori lock themselves in a bathroom stall and almost kiss, but don’t. Aubrey herself is pride, which she frankly doesn’t even think should be a sin, why is it bad to get good grades and be smug and insufferable? So that’s that. You’re all caught up.

THE SINNERS, bafflingly, also demands that you care about the town sheriff and his personal life and history, so there’s a scene where he comes to visit his wife Maggie, a teacher at the school. She’s trying to get pregnant, so she talks him into boning down right here, right now. “In the Lord’s library?” Sheriff Middleton asks. Yes. In the Lord’s library. Whenever there is a scene with the sheriff in it, my notes end with the word “ok.”

Grace’s ex-boyfriend Kit is waiting for her after school in his Jeep, and she agrees to talk with him. He drives her out to the lake, and she tells him she just needs space. Kit thinks that’s fine, he’ll just enroll in NASA, like NASA is a pottery class at the rec center. Grace goes to kiss him, but then decides this just doesn’t feel right, and gets out of the car to wander around the woods. It’s fine though, because she runs into a woman named Summer, with whom she is acquainted. Summer is barefoot. Summer is grounding. Summer asks Grace if she’s “made waves” with “the girl who likes [her]” yet. Nope! She hasn’t made waves with anybody. As Aubrey voiceovers that it’s always the people who are “all love and light” that are “the most broken” (Summer seems fine!), I realize that Grace didn’t just wander into the woods all willy-nilly, she actually works at a plant?? store??? in the middle of the woods???? It’s run by Summer’s boyfriend Andy, out of the Airstream trailer that they also live in????? The school principal drops by to buy a succulent, and when Grace tells him it’s $10, he replies, “Yes.” This exchange is so stilted and strange that I think it must mean something later, but it absolutely does not.

After work, Grace takes a bath with a fun glittery bath bomb and a million little candles and seems extremely high. Maybe she is! I don’t know. She goes down to the family dinner table, and her dad informs her that he heard a very interesting confession today, about Grace and her little cult, The Sins. Hey wait, what kind of church is this? It’s a pastor but they have confession? Are these the world’s strictest and weirdest Lutherans? I don’t think the Lutheran school by me even makes kids wear uniforms. If they’re Catholic, why isn’t he a Father? Grace correctly tells her dad they’re not a cult, but he tells her that from now on she can see neither Tori nor Kit (they already broke up!!) and will WALK in the PATH of the LORD. Unfortunately, he’s the same actor who played Jim in CIRCLE OF DECEPTION so he still looks and talks like an “Aldi brand Josh Homme.” Who made that joke? It’s pretty funny. The family gets into a fight, with Grace’s older sister Hannah taking her side, and her horrible brother Luke taking her dad’s side (“why can’t you just do as you’re told?” shut the fuck up Luke). Grace finally declares that she will be a good little lamb and blindly follow God. “Baaaaaa,” she concludes, adding, for clarity’s sake, “baaaaaaaaaa.” For a second it seems like the pastor is about to hit his daughter, but he just stalks off instead, followed by his dink son. Hannah and Grace sit at the table laughing and baaing, and I’m glad Grace has someone on her side.

Here are some other people on Grace’s side: some Satan-worshipping freaks in a dream she’s having! Three horny goths we do not see in any other scene in this movie are asking Grace to join hands with them on this bearskin rug. The horny goth leader has a thought: okay. Okay, get this: what if, what if, Satan was the good one, and God…… was bad? Yoooooo. They join hands and chant, “somnus, spiritum, vocant,” as distant animals howl and bark, until Grace wakes up at 3:33 a.m., with her hands around her neck.

This dream really hit Grace hard! When Tori picks her up the next morning she’s wearing the teeniest little camisole under her school uniform jumper, her hair is in braids that somehow read kind of slutty (??), and she has both bright red lipstick and a plan. The plan: steal the Barnes & Noble-ass leather-wrapped journal Aubrey is always scribbling in, and teach her a lesson. After school, Grace and the other Sins, minus Aubrey, boot the cheer squad (I guess?) from their rightfully reserved spot on “the back grass” (I guess???) to have a little meeting they could have had literally anywhere in the world. Rudeness: the eighth deadly sin. Grace drops Aubrey’s journal in the middle of their circle and announces that Aubrey ratted them out to Pastor Carver. She’s been writing down everybody’s secrets in this journal in her judgy cursive. Like, for example, she knows Stacey has been sleeping with her history TA. Stacey objects that it isn’t true, she wanted to but he said no. I object that it isn’t true, because K-12 schools don’t have TAs and also, I have seen no evidence that these students ever have a history class. There’s also stuff about how Robyn cheats because she’s lazy, and Molly is a glutton who overindulges in everything, blah blah blah. So they need to scare Aubrey into keeping her mouth shut. Good fuckin luck with that.

Grace informs her parents that she’s having her friends over for a Bible study, and you may be surprised to learn that this is a lie. The Sins gather in the attic, even Tori, cunningly disguised with straightened hair and cat-eye glasses, and await Aubrey’s arrival. She’s delighted to study the Bible with her best friends—oh no, what’s this? They’re joining hands and chanting “somnus, spiritum, vocant” while Grace dons little devil horns? “This is a devil chant,” hisses Aubrey, and Grace replies that the world is consumed by darkness, so let’s take our sins to the next level! Aubrey does not want to do that, she wants to study the Bible, and Tori snaps at her that the Bible isn’t even real! If it’s real, who wrote it, Katie asks? “People,” Aubrey replies, correctly, in a little whimper. Grace announces it’s time for the real business, which is: people do tasks that she announces. Okay! Time for someone to destroy something precious to someone. Tori gleefully seizes Aubrey’s Bible and rips a bunch of pages out of it, in a drastic escalation of the situation. Now, Grace asks, who gets to kiss her? “What?” asks Tori, thrown, “that wasn’t part of the plan.” Nevertheless, Grace crawls across the circle and kisses Tori. No tongue, but still! Good for her. Making waves! Then Grace puts the devil horns on Aubrey because isn’t she tired of being a good little girl? Doesn’t she want to be bad once in her life? Grace tells her that if she tells anyone about this, no one will believe her, because Grace is the pastor’s daughter, and who’s Aubrey? I mean, Grace is the pastor’s daughter who showed up to school this morning looking bananas, and who everyone has been calling The Deadly Sin Of Lust, and Aubrey is the prissiest priss who’s ever prissed, but sure.

Finally we return to Aubrey getting kidnapped by the other six girls, who, it must be said, look both great and completely bonkers in their catsuits and little leather jackets. Seventeen-year-olds have catsuits now. They drive to a lakeside cabin and pull Aubrey out of the trunk and onto the ground, where Tori kicks her in the guts, yells at her, and even chokes her a little before Grace tells her to stop. Tori seems a little taken aback by herself, but that’s Wrath, baby. Buckle up! During a brief discussion about hey maybe we shouldn’t have kidnapped our classmate, Aubrey makes a run for it, and as night falls, Aubrey is still in the woods by herself, voiceovering Hebrews 12:11, and the other girls go home.

The next morning, the remaining Sins, sleepy and guilty all, are pulled out of class to answer some questions about Aubrey, who didn’t come home last night. Do they know anything? They all tell Sheriff Middleton and Principal Ten-Dollar Succulent that Aubrey is sweet and she loves God and they don’t know anything else. The sheriff does know about the missing journal, but surely these innocent teens from good families don’t know anything about that. When they return to class, Molly finds the seven deadly sins scrawled onto her desktop, with “pride” scratched out. Katie tries to wipe it off with her hand but fails. It’s that new permanent chalk we’ve all heard so much about.

After school, Katie drives home in her new BMW, but when she gets out to open the gate, a masked figure emerges from the woods and grabs her. That explains why she’s late to the candlelight vigil the school is having for Aubrey, but her friends think it’s because she’s having her car detailed. I promise you I will never be late for a candlelight vigil because I’m having my car detailed. No part of that will ever happen, for me. Instead of having her car detailed or holding a candle, Katie is currently lashed to the ceiling of a horse barn somewhere, while a person brandishes a blowtorch at her. Wild!

Katie’s body is found in the swamp the next day, a rose placed in her mouth, and Aubrey’s voiceover informs us that the coroner, a guy named Feldman, was the first on the scene. And indeed here is this guy, haranguing the sheriff about if he’s knocked up his wife yet, maybe his boys can’t swim. You know, normal stuff guys talk about on the job. Okay.

At Katie’s funeral, people are sad. Some of the sad people are wearing cowboy hats, and some have huge black fans made of feathers. It takes all kinds. Many people are holding red roses, you know, the flower found in Katie’s dead mouth. Just so they don’t forget. Aubrey’s dad gets up to talk about how Katie will watch over his little girl and hopefully get her home safe, and if whoever is taking their girls is here now, well they just oughta fear the wrath of God and et cetera. “No mercy for the wicked!” cries the pod of cowboy-hatted men in the corner. As people file out into the dark (the rare evening funeral), Grace’s ex-boyfriend Kit invites her to a bonfire people are having in Katie’s memory. Oh, she would have loved that. While Grace considers this, Andy and Summer from the flower shop offer her their condolences. Summer helpfully suggests that maybe Katie will come back as a butterfly, but this beautiful rumination is interrupted by the sheriff arresting Andy for Katie’s murder. What! The sheriff tells Summer they found Andy’s gardening gloves near Katie’s body, and Summer protests that he doesn’t use gloves. Andy! You should wear gloves! The sheriff’s wife Maggie, recently seen boning her husband in the Lord’s library, is also here asking the sheriff to let Andy go, because apparently Andy is her brother. Okay. Despite Summer’s objections that “my man is all good vibes, he wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Andy is led away. I’m sure the judge will take his vibes into account when setting his bail.

Grace goes home after the funeral, and her dad issues some more clenched-jaw parenting. Shockingly, a bunch of constipated “I told you so” garbage doesn’t comfort Grace at all, and she gets up from the table. The pastor yells at her to come back and then is like, “well I’m all out of fatherly ideas,” as Grace goes to her room. Grace calls Tori to come pick her up and crawls out her window, and they drive back to the cabin as Grace declares they need to burn the journal. I think we’re past the point of burning the journal, but Tori agrees and assures her they’re all in this together.

Meanwhile, Molly has been kidnapped and is being held in the horse barn and drugged to death, and also a pentagram is being carved into her belly. So she’s having a roughie.

Anyway, Tori and Grace are at the quaint romantic cabin tossing the journal onto the fire, which looks fake but seems to eat up the pages well enough. Tori pulls Grace into her arms while they watch the pages burn, Grace tells her she loves her, and they smooch for a while. They can tell their kids about this someday. The smooching stops when Grace remembers the masks they wore to kidnap Aubrey are still in Tori’s trunk, and when Tori retrieves them she hears someone out in the woods. They decide to go back into town, where it’s not any safer actually, but maybe they’re just tired of kissing.

At the bonfire, one of the girls who was kicked off “““the back grass””” tells Stacey and Robyn that Katie had her skin boiled in oil, which is the biblical punishment for greed. We didn’t see that, but you know what they say: tell, don’t show. Also, Kit is here looking around for Grace, and the cheerleader or whatever informs him that Grace isn’t his girl, she’s Tori’s girl, she’s gay, and that makes him a lesbian. I don’t…you know what, why not. Be whatever. This is the last we see of Kit, good luck to him in his newfound lesbianism.

Arriving back at the Carver house, Tori and Grace stumble over Molly’s body, dumped on the front lawn. She also has a rose in her mouth, of course. Are there roses in the Bible? Who could possibly know. The sheriff, who has just learned that his wife is pregnant and his boys can swim after all (okay), shows up to ask the girls some questions. Grace’s mom sends the girls inside and tells the sheriff to do his job. He was trying! You made him stop! The pastor tells Sheriff Middleton that he’s all talk, no action, and not enough prayer. The pastor has one face and it is this: >:-|. One voice and it is that weird hoarse Batman voice. I really hate looking at and listening to him! They argue about if prayer would help the situation while looking at the dead body of a teenage girl on the lawn. Nobody’s bothered to cover her with a sheet or anything. It’s dark, it’s fine. Meanwhile, Grace is upstairs freaking out because her friends are dying and it’s possibly her fault, maybe her fault, she’s gotta get out of here.

Tori spirits Grace away to the romantic destination of: her car, eating french fries. Grace wants to go talk to Andy, newly released from jail after Molly turned up dead, haha whoopsy guess you weren’t killing teenagers after all! Tori thinks this is a terrible idea, just like all of Grace’s ideas actually. Grace yells that guess WHAT she is TRYING to get them OUT of this so MAYBE Tori can HELP for ONCE in her LIFE and if she could just DRIVE them to ANDY’S that would be GREAT, and concludes her thesis statement by throwing her fries at Tori. “NOTED,” yells Tori in return, and Grace screams “THANK YOU,” and it’s pretty funny. So is Tori eating one of the fries Grace threw at her and saying, “I mean, they’re perfectly good fries.”

While Tori and Grace drive to Andy’s, we see Stacey dead in a bathtub in the woods like half a Cialis ad. I looked it up in this extremely bitchy article, the punishment for envy is being immersed in cold water forever. Someone takes a polaroid of her. All right.

Despite there not being an evident road to Andy and Summer’s trailer, Tori finds it no problem. Andy tells Grace that whoever framed him definitely framed him on purpose; besides the gloves, chemicals used in flower preservatives showed up in Katie’s tox screen. Okay but then they just kept killing the Sins and doing the thing with the roses? So it very quickly became obvious it wasn’t Andy? This is not a good frame job! Tori and Grace leave, Grace stress-vomits on the side of the road (Tori holding back her hair and sympathizing, “you’re a real puker, huh?”), and they decide to go back to the cabin. Grace should have an idea other than “let’s go to a place that is not this place.”

Robyn, the last remaining B-list Sin, awakens in the horse barn with a blue rose in her mouth and a gun in her face. The person holding the gun asks her what her sin is, and then to list the other sins, and then shoots her in the face for screaming anyway. No, that’s not the proper punishment for sloth, but they didn’t have the budget for a pit of snakes.

It’s responsibility to tell you that there is a whole subplot about the sheriff and His Past or some bullshit, but honestly? You cannot make me care. This is already too long. My notes read “more cop hijinx. Doesn’t matter.” What matters is that they visit the house of Coroner Feldman, who you may remember from interrogating the sheriff about the vigor of his sperm. There they find polaroids of dead girls with roses in their mouths, and of Grace’s cabin.

Grace and Tori are back at that cabin. They went to a place. Unfortunately, someone beat them back there, and they’re immediately set upon and chloroformed by both the masked figure we’ve been seeing around the barn, and a masked Aubrey. Of course Aubrey is alive. Tori is dragged into another room while Grace is tied to a chair so Aubrey can explain the whole plot to her. We, the viewers and readers, are also metaphorically tied to a chair, that is how you can get us to sit through this.

Okay! So. Long story short, and Grace would have known this if she’d read Aubrey’s whole journal and not just the parts about herself and her friends, the coroner has been just fully worshipping Satan. Like, drinking from a golden chalice and bleeding onto a candlelit pentagram carved into a tree stump worshipping Satan. Chanting and making little devil horns with his hands worshipping Satan. Because he was doing this loudly, in his yard, his neighbor Aubrey saw him and freaked out about it. She knew she had to cleanse this town. Since the pastor clearly wasn’t up to the task, she knew she had to do it herself, blackmailing the coroner to do the actual murders. God told her that, actually, when she was hiding from the rest of the Sins in the woods. God said, “hey your neighbor wouldn’t want anyone to know he worships Satan, I bet you can get him to murder your enemies for you. I mean, for me. God.” Once Aubrey’s done with the Sins, she’s moving onto Feldman himself, and then Grace’s mother, who’s guilty of “adultery in the first degree,” which is not supported by the text of the movie, maybe they forgot to mention it? Also, Andy deserved to be framed for murder, on account of the drugs and paganism he and Summer do. It was so easy (to frame him and then immediately kill someone else, proving his innocence)! Aubrey’s going to redeem Grace by cleansing her, by which she means murdering her, just as soon as she’s done explaining this whole thing. I mean, she’s done now, but she’s going to talk some more. She calls Feldman to bring Tori out and gives her a nice hearty kick. As Aubrey sneers that they all thought she was some little Bible thumper sheep, but she’s the WOLF, Feldman sneaks up behind her with a gun to her head. “And you know what happens to the wolf!” Aubrey says, as her last words, before Feldman shoots her in the head. Which, if he was going to do that, he could have done it at any point.

Aubrey’s body is finally, finally ending up in the lake, tossed there by Grace and Tori under the watchful eye of Feldman and his gun. His plan now is: they’re going to tell the cops they killed their friends, he’ll take Grace’s “pretty mom” and take off. Is that the adultery? Who knows. The sheriff is here now, because they found those polaroids at Feldman’s house, and he asks Feldman to drop his weapon. Instead of doing that, Feldman shoots the sheriff in the shoulder. Oh no, and just as he was about to become a father! Plus a bunch of stuff I didn’t bother telling you! Tori rushes Feldman and takes his gun and he’s like, “go ahead, shoot me, dump me in the lake,” and I cannot stress enough how little we knew about this man before this scene. He had like three lines and two of them were about sperm. The sheriff’s deputy rushes in and shoots Feldman dead. The sheriff is fine, you don’t die from getting shot in the shoulder. The movie ends with Grace and Tori crying in the back of a cop car, as Aubrey again voiceovers 1 Corinthians, and again tells us this isn’t a story about love, or truth, it’s about sin. Okay!! Then why did you read me this, Aubrey!!!! Why did you read it to me twice! I’m glad you’re dead! Goodbye!