“Pet Sematary” is the second adaptation of the 1983 Stephen King novel of the same name. The film follows a family as they move from Boston to Ludlow, Maine. When the father is tricked into finding a burial ground behind their house, strange, supernatural things begin to occur.
I was a huge fan of the original. I saw it when I was younger, and it instilled a fear of children in me that would take years to shake. While it may seem cheesy to an adult, the movie made me think every kid was a scalpel wielding psychopath when I was a young teen. Going into this movie, I was hoping it would capture the terror I received from the original film and the novel.
Unfortunately, the film failed to deliver.
The most glaring issue is the way the film looks. The color palette makes the film look dull and uninteresting. It involves a horrid grey with dialed back colors which drain the depth of the frame, forcing boring, static shots over shaky handheld ones. By the end of the film, I questioned if the palette was a stylistic choice or a lazy way to hide they were shooting scenes that took place at night, during the day.
Comparatively, “IT” featured a monochrome palette, but the choice to pop colors out of it made the film visually appealing to watch. The way Georgie’s jacket always stood out, or the balloons, which were small in frame, seemed to bring a flash of color anytime Pennywise was or was not on the screen. The saturated colors of the day scenes in “IT” brought a liveliness to the film the same way the characters did.
“The Shining” took bright daylight and mixed it with a father losing touch with his own reality (a lot like the father in “Pet Sematary”), so the notion that a film has to be dim and muddy to give off a sense of dread has already been proven to be untrue. Horror needs to move away from the idea that it has to be dark in order to instill fear in the audience.
The second glaring issue is “Pet Sematary” takes far too long to gain steam. The story takes a lot of time to set up telling the audience what the burial ground is, its function and the repercussions of burial ground visitation through the mouthpiece of Jud (John Lithgow). Sadly, the execution of these explanations are bland and feel like the filmmakers are talking down to us as Louis (Jason Clark) and Jud sit down with books to inform the audience, which ultimately adds nothing to the narrative. It takes around an hour to really feel like something interesting is happening. The movie transitions to something that feels completely different, as if giving us tons of exposition allowed the filmmakers to become free and do what they really wanted to do—craft a horror movie.
The characters in this film all face the same force—grief. Louis is forced to face the loss of his daughter, Ellie (Jeté Laurence), Jud is forced to confront the loss of his wife and Rachel (Amy Seimetz) is forced to face trauma which has haunted her since childhood. Generally, this adds a connection between audience and characters, but in this film it hinders the characters. We spend at least an hour expanding on their stories. Yet, after the hour, I did not know any more or less about them than I did in the first fifteen minutes.
The characters move from Boston to have a change of pace, to get away from the long nights and busy days of the bustling city, only to find something much worse in Maine. Instead of focusing on the repercussions of using the burial ground, we get a lot of exposition about Rachel’s past that adds nothing to the film other than scares which never quite hit their mark. Louis is supposed to be broken down and in need of a change, but we never quite understand the reason he needs a change.
The shining star of this movie is Ellie, who steals our hearts at the beginning of the film and instills terror in the third act. Sadly, any attempt to bring horror to the screen is blocked by the filmmaker’s laziness, as most of the kills in this movie are done off-screen and left up to our imaginations. This rarely works in movies, and “Pet Sematary” falls into this trap. Long gone are the days of when horror movies had no fear and showed violence that drove home the grittiness of the genre. Now, every movie wants to take a safe approach.
“Pet Sematary” feels like two separate films packaged in one, and it does more harm when you start viewing the pacing of the film in retrospect. With bland visuals, an atrocious score, underdeveloped characters and overall laziness towards the gorier aspects of a slasher/paranormal horror movie, it fails to deliver on nearly every front. Thankfully, the third act and an ending that does not leave the viewer feeling cheated gives it a leg up against most of its 2019 horror peers.
