Pet Sematary (2019)

(Amazon Streaming, September 2021) Stephen King’s Pet Semetary is often called his scariest novel and while there’s a bit of marketing in that moniker, it’s not completely undeserved. Part of its appeal is how it completely engages with some extreme, universal terrors: the death of a child, for one, and then the temptation to cheat nature and somehow reverse death. While the novel is a bit of a slow build, emotions eventually run high at a level that readers can understand: what parent, after all, wouldn’t go to extremes to bring back their child? It’s an incredibly strong concept, and it led to a first, perfectly serviceable movie adaptation in 1989. Nobody was really asking for a remake, but Hollywood has a logic of its own and that’s why we got one anyway thirty years later. Surprisingly, this Pet Sematary makes a few unusual but calculated bets that expect viewers to have seen the previous version. The slow build of the original is gone — the directors have crammed as many jump scares as possible in order to keep audiences from getting antsy. More significantly, the film is replete with foreshadowing, ominous portents and thematic call-forwards, suggesting to viewers familiar with the first film that the film expects them to hang on for the ride. Even better: this Pet Sematary makes a few changes that don’t deviate from the central atmosphere of the original, but keep viewers on their toes. The cat brought back from death is overly (almost ridiculously) evil; the kid that dies is not the same; the ending makes explicit the suggested bleakness of the original finale. In other words, if you’ve read the novel or seen the first film, you will have a sense that this version is in constant dialogue with the original works, and those who experienced all of them. It doesn’t necessarily make for a particularly better movie — at times, this Pet Sematary becomes irritating with its refusal to let the tension build naturally, not to mention its more formulaic nature—but it does add a bit more interest to what could have been a mediocre result. Jason Clarke’s not bad here in the lead, but it’s a bearded John Lithgow who gets some attention as the crusty old guy warning them (not very efficiently) about meddling with forces they don’t understand. But, of course, we know what is going to happen — it’s in the nature of the genre. In the end, this Pet Sematary ends up neither better nor worse than from the original, most visibly exemplifying the differences in approaches between the late 1980s and the late 2010s.