Movie Breakdown: Pet Sematary (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
The image of Rachel Creed’s spinal meningitis-afflicted sister Zelda from the original Pet Sematary has haunted my dreams since I saw the flick when I was 11. The idea that the directors of the fantastic Hollywood horror film Starry Eyes now have that image to play with, well, I still haven’t decided if I’m queasy with excitement or nervousness.
Post-Screening Ramble:
For almost the entirety of its relatively speedy runtime, Pet Sematary is a dark, metaphor-laden creep-fest. The film – adapted for the second time from Stephen King’s novel of the same name – sees Louis Creed (Jason Clarke in pure professor mode), his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), their children Elie (Jete Laurence) and Gage (Hugo Lavole) and their cat Church move to rural Ludlow, Maine to escape the hustle of the big city and to spend more time together. Unfortunately for the Creeds, as their kindly curmudgeon of a neighbor Jud (John Lithgow) soon reveals, their 50 acres of property abuts a haunted Indian burial ground – a feared location abandoned by the tribes of yore that somehow grants the ability to bring the dead back to the living. Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch take one of King’s classic scarefests and strip it down to the bones, crafting a film that wraps itself around the questions of life after death and what our self-made answers amount to when we are faced with the loss of a loved one. There’s a melancholy that rides just under the surface of all of the characters, a wellspring of sadness and conflict that is touched upon just enough to throw the viewer off-kilter, to give the Creeds a superficial layer of perfection weighed down by their own frailty and susceptibility. A weakness exposed when tragedy strikes and the allure of resurrection suddenly becomes too strong to resist. Clarke and Seimitz play the harried couple well, hiding the flaws of their relationship until their own secrets tear them apart. There’s a slow build to the film, the moments of dread stacking up until its impossible not to know what’s going to happen, the viewer stuck staring at the horrors on the horizon but unable to do anything to avoid them. When everything does eventually go to shit – and it does so spectacularly – the film suddenly hurtles forward into lightspeed and goes through the motions of tying everything up and then ends with a daunting lack of resolution. It’s as if Kolsch and Widmyer had spent themselves building up the Creed family that when it came to their downfall, they just couldn’t bother. It’s a shame, too, Pet Sematary is a fine piece of somber horror for so much that when it banks hard into just another fright fest, it’s jarring and entirely unsatisfying. The tale of the Creed Family is a classic King story of the small hurt that finally festers and kills us, and in true King fashion, this newest adaptation of this classic just can’t stick the landing.
One More Thought:
Widmyer and Kolsch may have nailed the pacing and tone of a King novel better than any director up to this point. There’s a certain need for tangential story telling the author excels at and though this is a streamlined piece of movie making, you can feel the weight of these character’s pasts in every single scene.
Oh, One More Thought:
If you wanted to know, Zelda from the original Pet Sematary still stands as the scariest Zelda. She’s pretty frightening in this version, but nothing will ever top the creaking growl and stained blue night gown of Mary Lambert’s creation.
