Pet Sematary

The Creed's have moved to rural Maine and abandoned their life in Boston in an effort to allow Louis, an emergency room doctor, to have more time with his wife Rachel and their kids Ellie and Gage and of course the family cat Church (short for Winston Churchill). At first the pace of rural life suits them but the discovery of a Pet Sematary(sic) on their land unsettles Rachel and stirs up memories of childhood trauma. An accident and a subsequent trip to the land beyond the sematary led by Louis's neighbour Jud shows the Creed family that the things that go bump in the night are far more than stories to be ignored.

Stephen King wrote Pet Sematary in 1983. It's still a superb book and this is the second film adaption of it, the first being released in 1989. The 1989 version was pretty good but pared away a lot of what made the book so unsettling. This year's adaption sadly does the same thing but like the earlier movie still manages to be unsettlingly bleak and creepy. There's no fun time to be had here. Happily it's far better acted too. Dale Midkiff in the original was stiff as cardboard but Jason Clarke's everyman take on Louis will grab you the second he starts making stupid decisions. And man alive do he make a couple of doozies.

Most of the good in the film is down to committed performances from Clarke and Amy Seimitz as Rachel. Her backstory adds a touch of weight to the film by being understandable, a story some viewers will have experienced, well hopefully not to that extent. To be a success a horror movie has to at least give you a few character's you want to see do well and we get that here in the lead couple. John Lithgow's Jud is painfully dull though. He doesn't even attempt the new England drawl that made Fred Gwynne's 1989 Jud so memorable. Without him and that unique accent the film has no real sense of location at all which was one thing King's Maine set stories always got across well. The film gets the Pet Sematary right thankfully. Imagine finding something like that in your backyard. Even thinking about it would give you a right dose of the yips. What lies beyond it though, some may find the trip undertaken by Jud and Louis a tad overblown but for me it worked, conjuring up memories of old Hammer horror journeys through the thundery mountains of Carpathia. It's a silly, broad moment but it was my highlight of the film. It's just a pity the rest of the film didn't feel so right.

What made the book so effective was it's unrelenting focus on the horror of grief, something far more relatable to any audience than supernatural shenanigans. Here the film barely has time for any of that, aside from Rachel's story early on, as the story rushes us through proceedings to get us to the supernatural shenanigans. It's like directing duo Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer are afraid of letting the audience experience any emotion other than fear. Last year's Hereditary wasn't afraid of rubbing our noses in a character's grief and that was a huge success. They should have learned from that here instead of speeding through it all to wind things up at a box office friendly 100 minutes. As for the scary side of things, if you're new to this story a couple of very effective setpieces will nail you but if you aren't you'll know exactly what's coming. A second adaption of a book really should strive to be it's own thing but here the story is, aside from one gender flip and a more overblown ending, the same as before which renders the whole exercise rather pointless.

If you're new to the story of Pet Sematary you'll likely find this an effective watch but if not you won't miss anything by watching for it to pop up on netflix. It's one of the better adaptions of a Stephen King book but for a man who's back catalogue has been treated to shoddily that really isn't saying much at all.