Pet Sematary is a disappointingly bland horror film that is still competent enough to clear the bar, but just so.
Prolific horror writer Stephen King has steadily churned out enough content to keep Hollywood in business for several decades. His catalogue of terrifying, gruesome, and unsettling stories has given birth to film adaptations that are frequently good enough, occasionally masterful, and sometimes embarrassingly bad.
Adaptations including The Shining, Carrie, and Misery were bold and artful, drawing upon the text of King’s novels while discovering new ways to enhance the material to make it even more terrifying. On the other hand, movies like Sleepwalkers, Dreamcatcher, and Maximum Overdrive represent the lower-ranking adaptations, the ones that inspire laughter far more than they do fear.
The newest of these adaptations comes from directing duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, whose 2014 film Starry Eyes performed well on the horror festival circuit. Pet Sematary, first adapted for the screen in 1989 by Mary Lambert, makes its return to the big screen this weekend in a movie that is neither great enough to break into the upper echelon of Stephen King adaptations nor bad enough to call a failure. It’s an exceedingly competent horror film that does little to new breathe life into the story.
Pet Sematary begins well enough, quickly establishing the story’s tormented and morose atmosphere. After an opening credits sequence, set to drone footage over a dense New England forest, the film cuts to a slow push-in shot moving ominously towards a secluded family home. A car sits in the driveway, the driver’s side door open with a bloody hand print on the window. A trail of blood stains the porch. The camera moves closer to the front door, dread mounting with every passing second before the image fades away in a flash of white.
The film cuts to an overhead shot of a car, the same car seen previously with the bloody hand print, driving down a two lane road through the same dense forest. Here, we are introduced to our family, for better or for worse, for the next 101 minutes. Mother and father Rachel and Louis and their two kids Ellie and Gage. They are afflicted by all the familiar tropes of a family trapped in a horror flick: they’re wealthy, they need a fresh start in a new place, dad needs to spend more time with his kids and less time at work, mom is struggling with her dark past, et cetera et cetera.
If these elements sound a bit familiar, even rote or mechanical, it’s because they are. Pet Sematary strictly abides by the familiar template used in King’s work: a family isolated in a rural location confronting forces of evil that happen to be a reflection of their own inner turmoil. This is a formula that has worked wonders in the past, but Pet Sematary uses that formula as an excuse for laziness. With the exception of one significant adjustment to the film’s third act (that hurts, rather than helps), Pet Sematary appears content to pass through the motions of the story with no interest in making Pet Sematary a unique adaptation.
The interplay between the natural and supernatural is a core principle of Stephen King’s oeuvre, but this adaptation of Pet Sematary struggles to achieve the same balance. The overwhelmingly traditional, and at times tedious, approach to telling the story prevents the weirder elements of the story from feeling fully realized. The fear meant to be evoked by the titular Pet Semetary and the burial site’s power to bring things back from the dead simply never reaches a satisfying payoff. Pet Sematary appears more committed to creating a salient narrative about grief than fully utilizing the horror elements of King’s novel to create something genuinely terrifying.
Still, the movie is not without its moments. When it’s not abruptly blasting the volume to make you jump out of your seat, Pet Semetary manages to craft a few good scares. From the violent death of a patient at Louis’ clinic to the flashback revealing the death of Rachel’s deformed twin sister, the scariest moments in the movie are those that allow the audience to experience the protagonists’ own trauma, fear, and grief. These moments stand out thanks to the performances from Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz. They manage to make their fear feel real even when what they’re afraid of feels less than authentic.
Newcomer Jeté Laurence plays Ellie, Rachel and Louis’ precocious nine-year-old daughter. Ellie’s role is essential to the film, offering a charm and warmth to a film that is otherwise oppressively dour. Ellie’s arc in the film serves an essential purpose, serving as a conduit for the audience’s empathy and a target for the horrific forces at work in the story. The film draws on Ellie’s own struggle with understanding and accepting death — an issue she is able to articulate in a way her parents cannot — as a way of deepening the emotional landscape of the story.
The film is successful as a portrait of a family come undone, but falters when it comes to the forces that undo them. By failing to bring a distinct visual style to the film — the color palette of the film is best described as “dark,” and there’s almost no real direction behind the camera — and relying too heavily on exposition and unrealistic dialogue, the elements of the film meant to terrify us are just too obviously telegraphed to feel anything but inert.
Ultimately, Pet Sematary is a perfectly competent adaptation that hits every beat you would expect of a major studio horror film in 2019. For some, that’ll be enough! However, at a time when adaptations or remakes of Stephen King properties are trending upwards, Pet Sematary is an uninspiring and somewhat discouraging adaptation. Even with an R rating, the film feels like it’s playing it safe; by failing to fully commit to the weirder elements of King’s novel, the full potential of the story feels wasted.