Review: Pet Sematary Is a Hardcore Nightmare
Firmly entrenched in the era of Stephen King adaptation after Stephen King adaptation as we are, it was only a matter of time before a reboot of King's, by his own admission, most hardcore and disturbing novel Pet Sematary made it to the big screen. The book, which introduces trauma after trauma and violent death after violent death, is relentless. It sucks you into its bleak, hopeless world and keeps you there.
Pet Sematary, the new movie from Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (Starry Eyes) can enjoy no such luxury. The film clocks in at just over an hour and a half, and has little time to build anything resembling King's trademark black cloud of dread as we get to know our characters, instead resorting to a... generous amount of jump scares almost as soon as the film gets underway. An artful adaptation this is not.
But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Kölsch and Widmyer have created something of a speed-run remix of the novel, hitting the main thematic beats it needs to while twisting the story and certain character's fates into something quite surprisingly different at times. It's nowhere near among the most successful King adaptations, but it gets the job done as an engaging, slightly-more-thoughtful-than-it-needs-to-be horror, anchored by three brilliant performances.
The first, and most significant belongs to Jeté Laurence as Ellie Creed, daughter to Louis (Jason Clarke) and Rachel (Amy Seimetz), and elder sister to Gage. Extreme spoiler alert: Ellie dies partway into the film, a major departure from the novel in which Gage is the one to go. The decision has divided loyal fans of the book, but from a cinematic perspective, it's a no brainer. Laurence, who is only 11, turns in a brilliant performance as the family's anxious daughter, who begins to question the finer points of death. Later, as Ellie's demonic reanimated body wreaks havoc, Laurence is called on not just to be sinister in the way little girls in dresses in horror movies usually are, but also to go much further. She's manipulative, cruel, and dangerous, her eyes blazing with the hatred of an eons-old evil. You can't get that from a toddler, and this spin on conventional proceedings is Pet Sematary's main success.
Clarke too is as good as he's ever been, subtly tweaking his regular everyman husband into someone a little more vulnerable and stubborn. Early on, he and Rachel disagree on telling Ellie about death. Rachel's faith makes her reticent to introduce the concept of finality to their preteen daughter. Louis, pragmatically, thinks she shouldn't be shielded from the realities of mortality. And boy, isn't she.
It's after Ellie's resurrection that the film (amusingly) comes to life. Even the most hardcore horror films must retain a sense of humor, and Pet Sematary's first hour is disappointingly utilitarian and dour, punctuated by cheap scare after cheap scare to the point that it becomes tiresome. But it's after Ellie's untimely death the picture becomes clearer and the film's message reveals itself in all its tragic irony when Louis discovers he is the one unable to accept the reality of his daughter's death and makes the executive decision to bring her back by burying her in a mysterious plot of land beyond the titular "pet sematary" (the sign misspelled by the children who presumably built it). The experiment already failed once: the dead family cat Church returns early in the movie as a mottled, cruel predator. Having seen both resurrections with his own eyes, Clarke plays the tragedy of it all perfectly: Louis is simultaneously weak, determined, and unwilling to entertain the idea that Ellie coming back could ever be a bad idea.
Which brings us to Seimetz as Rachel, the third pitch-perfect character in this inevitable, almost Shakespearean tragedy. It is bad enough to lose a child; it is even worse when your inept husband buries her in evil dirt and turns her into a demon. "Hug your daughter, Rachel," Louis instructs her in the film's best scene, when Rachel returns home to find the muddied, grey-skinned approximation of her child in the living room.
From there, the Ellie-centric chaos plays better and more enjoyably than the series of bleak events that preceded it. It takes a while to get there, but Pet Sematary is at its best when we watch the true destruction of the family unit, the ones we've come to care about, the ones whose fears we already know, and how it will play against them. Caught up in the chaos is their neighbor Jud (doomed, obviously,) ably played by John Lithgow, who never met a friendly phrase he couldn't make subtly sinister.
The film's end finds itself remixed, too. And the final shot is nothing short of a shocking triumph in the horror movie canon. Ultimately, Pet Sematary eases us into a false sense of security, teasing us with a paint-by-numbers studio scare fest, before embracing King's love of cold, cruel surprises in ways neither book readers nor general audiences will see coming. It's just a shame the film plays it so safe for so long before the real shit hits the fan.
