Movie Review--Pet Sematary (2019)

"This is the place where the dead rest.  Do not go on to the place where the dead walk."
--Victor Pascow, Pet Sematary


2019 saw the release of Doctor Sleep and It: Chapter Two, both adaptions of Stephen King novels and sequels to popular films.  Earlier in the year, a remake of Pet Semetary was also released, although it had neither the grand scope nor the cultural visibility of The Shining or It: Chapter One even before the other two Stephen King movies of the same year continued their respective stories.  Pet Sematary seemingly faded away from general public attention in the following months.  It actually is not a horrible movie, just one that does lack the same thematic and storytelling substance as something like Doctor Sleep.  This remake drifts closer to overall mediocrity while still managing to offer firm strengths.

Production Values

Jason Clarke, who has served as the lead in an excellent PG-13 horror film called Winchester, again takes the role of main character and doctor Louis Creed.  Amy Seimetz (Alien Covenant) plays his wife Rachel, a woman who battles her own dark trials as her husband learns of a Native American burial ground.  Neither character is particularly complex in the ways that someone like Dan Torrence of Doctor Sleep is, but the performances are not responsible for that.  However, Ellie, the oldest child of Louis and Rachel, and Jud, their neighbor, give excellent performances in the second half of the film.  John Lithgow's Jud displays everything from grief to attachment after a key tragedy, while Jete Laurence's Ellie has a far more prominent screen presence later on.  The acting helps counter the fact that Pet Semetary does feature far more jumpscares than the best kinds of horror movies, many of them having to do with loud trucks.


Story

Some spoilers are below.

Louis Creed, a doctor, moves with his wife Rachel, his two children, and the family cat Church to a new home in a forest region.  Nearby the home sits a road occasionally used by massive trucks.  A pet cemetery used by local children to bury pets also sits nearby, and a neighbor named Jud helps Louis use a mysterious plot of land behind the pet cemetery to resurrect Church.  The cat displays more aggressive behavior than before, all as Louis has visions of a deceased patient named Victor Pascow and as Rachel relives frightening memories of her sister Zelda's death.  When his oldest child dies when she is unexpectedly hit by a vehicle, Louis has to decide if he will bury his own daughter in the same area where Church was buried.

Intellectual Content

It may leave a lot of important but basic logical facts about the concept of an afterlife unaddressed, but Pet Sematary does have a very direct thematic focus on the distinction between life and death and the issue of whether an afterlife exists.  Louis starts the movie as a seeming naturalist (in spite of the immateriality of logic, space, time, and consciousness, all things that can be fully proven to exist) who dismisses the genuine possibility of an afterlife completely, as he merely makes an assumption without logical proof.  His neighbor Jud believes in a supernatural force on sensory grounds, for he has experienced the resurrection powers of the tribal burial ground, yet he inanely claims that what happens there cannot be rationally understood.  He completely fails to realize that anything that is true is true either because it is logically necessary because it could not have been any other way (such as the intrinsic veracity of logic) or because it is logically possible.  Whatever supernatural events and forces exist are not irrational or inexplicable, as Jud claims.  They would be part of reality just as much as any material object that actually exists.  It is asinine to claim that something exists or is true without it being a part of reality, which is governed by reason inescapably!

Conclusion

Pet Semetary is certainly not the best Stephen King film adaption of recent years.  That honor belongs to Doctor Sleep, which is followed by It: Chapter One.  This, of course, does not make Pet Semetary a bad movie on its own, and it is not a movie of poor quality.  It is just largely mediocre compared to what it could have been and compared to its aforementioned siblings.  There are aspects with greatness and aspects with relative superficiality.  The combination of these aspects is a movie with consistently strong acting and generic characterization (which is not always negative in itself!) that brushes up against the important philosophical nature of life and death while not correcting some of its characters' most blatant assumptions and misconceptions about the subject.


Content:
 1.  Violence:  A man is shown on a hospital bed after an accident leaves his face so wounded on one side that his brain is visible.  A woman falls to her death, landing in a twisted shape.  In one of the only scenes of physical conflict between characters, a person is stabbed onscreen and widescreen.
 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck, "shit," and "bitch" are used.