Mark Reviews Movies: THE SONATA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 9, 2020

Music is the food, not of love, but of evil in The Sonata, a slightly atmospheric but monotonous and, ultimately, critically silly horror tale. Instead of leaning into the inherent creepiness of his story and setting, co-writer/director Andrew Desmond bypasses that for a dull, exposition-heavy scavenger hunt.

Rose (Freya Tingley) is a professional violinist and a rising star. Her manager Charles (Simon Abkarian) arrives at a recording session with some news: Her estranged father, the famously eccentric composer Richard Marlowe (the late Rutger Hauer), has died.

Rose doesn't care, but she does inherit her old man's mansion in France. There, he has spent a couple of decades in isolation, composing a final sonata for violin before committing suicide by self-immolation.

The rest of the movie follow Rose as she wanders around the mansion, finding her father's sheet music and assorted clues to read the strange symbols that Richard has embedded into the piece. When she plays some of the composition on piano, a strange, shadowy figure appears behind her in the reflection of the instrument. Meanwhile, Charles, a recovering alcoholic, begins doing his own research into the dead composer, discovering that Richard became obsessed with the occult—namely the notion that music might have the ability to summon the anti-Christ.

That's the extent of the story, which proceeds to follow a completely predictable path. Rose finds some more clues, unaware of their evil foundation, and after spending an inordinate amount of time listening to other characters explain Richard's unholy ambitions, Charles arrives at the mansion. He believes that the composer's final piece might be his ticket to the success that has eluded him for his entire career. His sudden descent into a form of Satanic panic is almost comical, especially in how Desmond and Abkarian fail to keep it much of a secret.

The mansion is, admittedly, an imposingly lonely and eerie locale, and Rose's second-act trip into the forest, where she finds a chapel in which her father performed some horrible rituals, is sort of chilling in isolation from the rest of the movie. That sequence, though, is also the start of Desmond's attempt to overcompensate for the lack of much happening through the rest of The Sonata. The finale is overblown melodrama and ungodly horror coming together in a most ineffectual union.

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