Pet Sematary (2019) - Movie Review

While it didn’t get a lot of love back in the day (and judging by reactions to today’s film, that feeling persists), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is a fucking great horror flick and one of the better Stephen King adaptations. Having King himself penning the screenplay certainly helped, but as a look at how people react to grief and why it is vitally important to come to terms with that grief, it is a seriously intense ride, if an occasionally goofy one.

I’d argue the point in remaking the story in the first place, but considering the recent crop of King adaptations and their combined consistency, I’m not entirely against the idea. Hell, this one has an uncredited David Kajganich working on the script, and given how well he did with last year’s remake of Suspiria, this could turn out good. However, as I’m about to get into, this film ends up being a mish-mash of underperforming, overperforming and just outweirding the original and not all in good ways.

Getting the positives out of the way, the film looks great. It employs the typical washed-out dangerously-close-to-black-and-white colour palette that most modern horror movies go after, and for a story all about human morbidity, it certainly fits the tone of the piece. It also allows for a more foreboding atmosphere to seep through the production, similar to The Nun in how it lets the dread hang on the near-monochrome visuals. It’s that atmosphere that shows the first thing this film manages to succeed the original at, as King’s trademark self-conscious weirdness has been considerably dialled down to make this feel a bit dourer. It definitely helps that the images of kids in animal masks connected to the titular graveyard gives the film some Wicker Man vibes that add some nice texture to the story.

From there, we have the acting and… well, I genuinely hesitate to say it’s outright better than the original because, while everyone here definitely works in their specific roles, nothing here carries the same memorability as the original. The father’s downward spiral into desperation has toned down, meaning that Jason Clarke has less to work with, as has the mother’s relationship with her late sister which admittedly is still incredibly creepy but misses out on the true pitch-black tone of the original in showing how dark the thoughts connected to the dead and dying can become.

To add to that, the roles of the children have been swapped around, with the sister as the one who gets brought back from the dead and the brother with the psychic powers that always crop up in King stories to varying degrees. Jeté Laurence does well as the resident creepy child, and she certainly sells how murderous the character gets, but considering her role in the original was played by Miko Hughes, a hall-of-famer for terrifying child acting, it just doesn’t measure up as well.

With how drastically different this film gets in comparison to both the original film and the original short story, it almost feels unfair to directly compare the two. But with that said, part of this film relies on the audience being somewhat familiar with the original, partly so it can misdirect the audience and partly to correct a couple of things. While the changes made vary from good (explaining Jud’s sudden need to nap at the worst possible time) to the somewhat lame (the infamous ankle-slicing incident being shifted) to the plain confusing (the ending).

Being different isn’t inherently a bad thing, so long as what’s being changed is able to hold its own with what it’s replacing. This is where we start getting into the weaker parts of this production, starting with its approach to horror. In the original, in-between friendly ghost encounters and Mommie Dearest levels of mindfrag, the horror came from the examination of the very real and very unsettling thought patterns the grieving go through in the face of a loved one’s death. Here, it’s mainly shown through jump scares that are propped up by the visual atmosphere. It is quite frustrating how reliant this film gets on sudden jolts to the system to get the audience on edge, especially since it all amounts to surface-level tension and not much else.

Honestly, all the things that worked about the original, it’s the approach to its themes that I appreciated the most, which is why this remake annoys me so much thinking back on it. Where the original dived deep into the murkier parts of the human psyche, showing the kind of damage that can be done to both young and old when we refuse to accept that death is the natural conclusion to life. There are shades of that to be found with this one, but it isn’t nearly as compelling and the way that the details get shuffled around ends up robbing them of their impact.

Ultimately, this film equals out to about 30% establishing itself as its own production separate from past incarnations, 30% actively misdirecting audiences who are aware of those past incarnations, 30% trying to recapture the sheer dread of the original with varying success, and a final 10% of just plain weird and unfortunately counterproductive ideas that only muddle this story even further. It’s certainly a different beast to the original, since the entire third act is markedly different, but it can’t even carve out its own path as a story because it leans so heavily on what came before, much to the film’s own detriment.