Pet Sematary

Returning to Stephen King’s darkest novel, a story that largely revolves around death and characters who can’t accept the finality that it brings, this redo remixes a few of the elements to reasonable effect, but ultimately doesn’t entirely justify itself. There’s a lot of surface elements of better recent movies from the recent horror renaissance (the early shots of the kids in animal masks, for example) that don’t really go any deeper than a good visual, and some of the plot elements feel distinctly obligatory. The original film version was a middling exercise but with a few good jump scares and a great performance by Fred Gwynne, and, ultimately, this redo proves to again be mostly fairly middling, with John Lithgow proving a good replacement for Fred Gwynne, and some clever twists of the tale here and there (in particular, I quite like the grotesque ending this chooses, which is not King’s original). Jason Clarke continues his run of somehow being hired in international films despite never being a particularly compelling presence on screen, there’s a few decent moments of grotesque makeup, and it does capture some of the tragic inevitability of King’s novel … but it’s still middling fare without a particularly compelling reason to exist beyond that the source material remains good.