★★★
Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, relocate from Boston to rural Maine with their two young children. The couple soon discover a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near their new home.
Classification: 15
If you could bring back the dead, would it be worth the cost?, Pet Sematary’s morbid central question slithers and creeps through out this latest adaptation of Stephen King’s acclaimed novel. Atmosphere and performance take centre stage as directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer struggle with pacing and execution of the central themes. Concepts of guilt, the afterlife and responsibility are weaved throughout the story to narrative conclusions that are only somewhat satisfying.
Jason Clarke stars as Louis Creed, a doctor who has moved his family to the town of Ludlow Maine, to a beautiful property where in the vast acreage lies the titular Pet Sematary. Creed and his wife Rachel have two children, nine year old Ellie and baby Gage, soon both parents are haunted by visions of the dead, Louis by a dead patient and Rachel by her deformed sister Zelda. Both are deaths they feel responsible and the visions bear omens and foreshadowing for the plot. The Creeds make the acquaintance of their neighbour Jud Crandall (John Lithgow) who operates as the film’s exposition giving Louis all the information he and the audience needs to understand the nature of the Pet Sematary.
The horror elements of the film are effective, many sequences will take time to build the dread with atmosphere and sound design. Louis and Jud’s journey beyond the pet sematary is a stand out sequence in the film, filled with foreboding darkness and dire warnings of what’s to come. The best horror comes from Rachel’s disturbing hallucinations about her sister Zelda but overall the story isn’t too gripping because how easy it is to predict the beats of the film. However that doesn’t mean Pet Sematary doesn’t have any tricks up it’s sleeve with some great shocks and twists sprinkled throughout its runtime.
Clarke’s performance as the Creed patriarch is effective and humanising with his slow descent never becoming unrealistic or unsympathetic. Even though most of Lithgow’s performance is regulated to exposition and eerie warnings he does deliver a likeable enough character who plays off well with Clarke’s Louis. The stand out is Jeté Laurence whose performance as Ellie Creed evolves across the film and is responsible for some of the film’s best emotional moments. Narratively, Pet Sematary focuses on building the fright and delivering the scares in sacrifice of delivering the best conclusion for the characters.
Nothing in Pet Sematary is ridiculous or terrible but the overall film isn’t as satisfying as it seemed to be building up to. The scares are effective and the themes add an extra layer to the horror unfolding for the Creeds but the lack of satisfying conclusions in the story doesn’t allow the film to resonate with audiences as well as it could.
Directors: Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence
Release Date: April 5th 2019
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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