Pet Sematary (2019)

I was a big admirer of director duo Kevin Kölsch’s and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes, so I was really rather excited going into their new adaptation of what very well might be Stephen King’s best novel – it’s certainly the King novel that delves deepest into abysses the author tends to shy away from at the last moment in most of his other books. Unfortunately, shying away from abysses is pretty much this film’s modus operandi, the script by Matt Greenberg and Jeff Buhler somehow managing to make a film about desperate grief encountering the worst of King’s malevolent places, and the horrors of not just loss but the lies loss can make you believe, and the terrible things one might do for love feel like an emotionally uninvolving ultra-conventional horror movie.

Visually, Kölsch and Widmyer  do from time to time hit upon a strikingly creepy image – I thought the very artificial and therefore strange in the mostly realist movie surrounding it look of the Bad Place was a particularly good touch – but more often than not, they turn out what any middling craftsman in modern horror can, with horror sequences that are as obvious as they are conventional, and little of the visual mirroring of the protagonists’ inner lives through their surroundings the film desperately needed. Most of the horror business is perfectly okay, but perfectly okay is simply not enough here.

The script seems mostly concerned with streamlining the novel the film’s based on, and I generally understand this approach when adapting King; the man does tend to go off in unnecessary directions rather regularly, and some of this stuff should indeed be edited out. However, Pet Sematary is not one of those King novels, and excising things here would need a much calmer hand than the writers have to offer, for so much what is streamlined away is exactly what makes the novel as devastating and honest about the human heart as it is. The film’s writing, despite serviceable performances by Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow, really only knows how to go through the surface motions of loss and grief, and the way it treats these emotions, they never seem to be at the core of the horror here but only motions the plot needs to go through to set up the standard horror tropes and shocks. And don’t get me even started on the film’s new improved (ha!) ending which puts all responsibility for things turning out very badly indeed on the shoulders of the Bad Place, and only very little on the humans involved, turning a heart-breaking ending that does not look away from the terrible things it believes about the human condition into just another example of the crappy horror movie “bad” ending that feels dishonest and cowardly in this particular context. One might start believing the filmmakers don’t actually understand that the point of Pet Sematary isn’t OMG! KID ZOMBIES!


It all comes over as just terribly generic and conventional, lacking any spark of true creativity or insight. And yes, I know, I’m always going on about how one should try not to compare adaptations to the things they are adapating too directly and try and look at them as their own thing, but even when I try and ignore that Pet Sematary is based on one of the best horror novels ever written, there’s still little to praise here, for a couple of couple of good images embedded into dreary horror by numbers do not a memorable film make.

In short: Starry Eyes (2014)

Like so many young women in Hollywood, Sarah (Alex Essoe) has the dream of becoming not just a working actress but a very traditional star. All that dream has brought her so far are bunch of failed auditions, a humiliating job as a waitress in a themed fast food restaurant, a bunch of friends of dubious quality, and the habit to reduce her stress levels by angrily pulling her own hair out.

Things – and not just things – are certainly going to change for her when she has a breakdown (with hair-pulling, screaming, the works) after a particularly humiliating audition for a horror movie with the puntastic title of “The Silver Scream”. Witnessing this the casting director (Maria Olsen) at once warms to her, inviting her to another session of doing exactly the same in front of her and her assistant. They’re well pleased with Sarah’s following performance/live breakdown. In the following weeks, there are further sessions of appropriately sadistic vigour, all in the name of helping Sarah transform herself completely (which you may want to take very literally). Why, one might even think these people belong to some kind of occult society with sinister goals! All the while, Sarah’s life – inward and outward – unravels around her.

Kevin Kolsch’s (or Kölsch – IMDB and credits don’t agree) and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes is quite the thing, applying choice occult horror tropes to the small yet fine Hollywood horror story sub-genre (or perhaps the other way around) in consequent and increasingly bloody (and pus-sy etc) ways.

This is a film about the will to success taken to its most horrid extremes, a film that views character traits and concepts US cinema very often praises to high heavens as a particularly insidious road to self-destruction. Self-destruction of this type, the film argues, is in one form or the other generally approved of or even expected from actresses trying for a breakthrough that will most probably never come. Being a horror film, Starry Eyes does take the whole self-destruction/total transformation business very literally, not accidentally hitting the core of desperation lying under the idea of turning oneself into a star until it oozes blood and gore.

The whole thing is grounded by Alex Essoe’s terrific performance as Sarah, a full-body tour de force that is as uncomfortable to watch as it should be, including moments of horrible frailty, putting things on display that’ll make you squirm – particularly since the performance has a terrible sense of honesty about it.

Obviously, Starry Eyes is not a terribly easy film to watch – not because it is a bad film, but rather because it is so effective at making the audience look at exactly the things it really doesn’t want to see; it’s brilliant and exhausting.