Pet Sematary (dir. Kölsch & Widmyer, 2019) — Review

Download the Pet Sematary screenplay for personal, private use.

Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary remake provides an unfortunate illustration of the story’s moral: some things are better off dead. Bundling the overfamiliar characters and premise of Stephen King’s ubiquitous 1983 source material (and its 1989 film adaption) into their graves (and out again) with an air of resigned efficiency, this big-budget effort is a study in soulless resurrection. In more ways than one.

Louis and Rachel Creed (Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz) move into a new home in creepy rural Maine, encircled by shady locals, with their daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence), toddler Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), and the family feline, Church. Within the first five minutes, the audience has been slapped about the face with an identikit horror setup, a brusque collage of animal-headed forest marchers, Ellie wandering into the eponymous makeshift burial ground, and the appearance of an elderly neighbour, Jud (John Lithgow), whose warnings to stay away are so obviously wasted that the film could have shaved off a few more seconds in its Olympic sprint through the exposition.

Such icily efficient filmmaking sacrifices depth and complexity in favour of immediate gratification, perhaps an inevitable compromise when tasked with yet another King remake, starved of any blockbuster casting. While the directors avoid patronising their horror-literate viewers with an unnecessary guessing game, they brutally sacrifice any sense of atmospheric crescendo, producing a half-baked cinematic world left scrambling to catch up with its unrelenting plot.

The decision to limit splashes of stylistic excess, such as the children’s funeral procession, seems out of place in a film that otherwise celebrates the horror genre’s flair for the dramatic, with the mist that sweeps through each graveyard scene, or the lavishly indulgent scenes of gore and violence. The latter are certainly impressive. After Ellie’s accidental death, she is buried and resurrected by the mysterious powers of the ancient gravesite that is hidden beyond its pet-centred counterpart, under the hyperviolent auspices of the local Wendigo. This half-human, shapeshifting beastie stems from the folklore of the Algonquin tribes of Northern America, a subject skirted by a film which seems leery of the black mark of cultural appropriation. The legend of the Wendigo nonetheless pervades the events of the film, particularly its fondness for cannibalism — incorporated in a fairly restrained manner by the directors maintaining a respectable distance from the gore-horror sub-genre, and keeping the violence firmly subordinate to the breakneck speed of the plot.

While it succeeds in keeping the violence convincing, the pace of the film leaves room for little character development; in typically efficient form, the directors squeeze in one solid backstory in the form of an alteration from King’s novel: Rachel Creed’s traumatic childhood as a carer for her chronically ill sister, Zelda. However, in a departure from King’s vision of Zelda (dying tragically of spinal meningitis), the young Rachel witnesses her (bitchy) sister falling into a dumbwaiter, and is haunted by the vision of her mangled corpse. The jarring imagery of the flashback makes a welcome, lingering departure from the cheap and unmemorable instant- jump scares which characterise the rest of the film. Although these fulfil their immediate goal, they lack the emotional intensity and longevity of unease offered by the Rachel-Zelda sequence in particular.

Pet Sematary is a decent, technically solid film — the jump scares effective, the gore well-integrated, the children and animals adorable, even in psychotic undead form. Alas, life imitates art with the relentless advance of a soulless reanimation, hell-bent on extinguishing the humanity of its original character.