A slow-paced and mostly uneventful film, Pet Sematary is a fairly forgettable horror film, mostly suffering from a weak and uninteresting script. However, mostly due to to the strong performances and decent enough scares, it manages to bring a little more flair to this remake adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.
Pet Sematary follows the Creed family — Louis (Jason Clarke), Rachel (Amy Seimetz), Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and Gage (Hugo Lavoie and Lucas Lavoie) — as they move from Boston to the woods of rural Maine. The family eventually discovers a mysterious graveyard known as the Pet Sematary behind their home and, with the help of the neighbor (John Lithgow), find out that it has the power to bring the dead back to life.
The original Pet Sematary was a straight-to-video release in 1989, complete with low-budget effects, but was still a fairly successful film, grossing $57 million in North America. The main issue with the adapting this Stephen King novel to the big screen is that the story isn’t all that interesting and is an incredibly slow-burn.
That’s not to say that a film cannot work on this level. However, when comparing it to some of the King’s better book-to-screen adaptations like The Shining, Misery and even 2017’s It, Pet Sematary doesn’t even a compare. It all comes back to the main issue with adapting a story like this: nothing substantial happens. This movie could be condensed down to an 80-minute made-for-TV movie with slightly lower production values, and it would probably be better for it.
It takes so long to get the plot moving and get to the actual meat of the story. The problem with this is that the movie takes most of its first two acts describing how the Pet Sematary works to the audience. It feels like the director thinks that the audience doesn’t understand it, and unfortunately that results in a lot of situation where people are just sitting and explaining things to one another, particularly when it comes to Lithgow’s character, Jud. It’s not an overly complex idea to understand, even if you are unfamiliar with King’s novel or the original film.
Unfortunately, this need to fill up the empty time results a lot of unnecessary plot points. The most glaring one involves the mother of the family, Rachel, being plagued with flashbacks of her older sister. While it works in terms of character development for Rachel, it doesn’t give anything to the overall narrative of the story. It’s hard to care about it at all and the film spends way too much time delving into it. The entire point of the backstory could have been put into one five-minute scene early on in the movie, and never mentioned again. Instead, we get flashbacks throughout the entirety of the film’s running time.
The film is somewhat saved by it’s leads performers, who are far better than they have any right to be in a film like this. Clarke is the focal point of this film, and he does an excellent job with the material he is given. He However, his character is not too fleshed out, especially when compared to Seimetz, who plays his wife Rachel. Clarke gives the best performance in this film, and it’s hard to understand why the filmmakers chose to not flesh out his story a bit more. His character is fairly reactive and does whatever the script requires the character to do, but he doesn’t feel real enough to be relatable to audiences.
A huge standout of the film is that is Laurence, who plays the Creed’s daughter Ellie. First coming off as a standard child actor in a horror film, she completely transforms in the film’s third act. The script asks a lot from her as an actress, and she manages to do it all and more perfectly. Laurence also has incredible chemistry with Lithgow, as the two characters grow a cute relationship throughout the film that adds more emotional weight than any of the other relationships in the movie.
The film does take some creative license and change a few things from King’s novel. However, none of these changes are egregious or take anything away from the adaptation. Actually, the change seemed to benefit the film than harm it.
However the climax of the film is probably the most unsatisfying ending to a horror film seen on the big screen in years. There’s no weight or emotion to any of the events because the film fails to make the audience care too much about any of the characters. There’s also just a feeling of incompleteness to it, like nothing you just saw really matters. There was a better way to do this ending that would leave the audience with more of a sense of dread rather than melancholy.
Ultimately, Pet Sematary is a disappointing remake in a world full of them. It’s entertaining enough as a rainy day, free-on-Netflix type of movie, but its not worth the energy to see it on the big screen. Although there are some great performances to be found, Pet Sematary is overstuffed with unnecessary story threads, slow-paced horror scenes and an unsatisfying conclusion.
Grade: 2 / 5 Woo’s
Directed: Kevin Kölsch & Dennis Widmyer
Starring: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow & Jeté Laurence
Release Date: April 5, 2019
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