‘Pet Sematary’ Review: Scary, but Not Enough Character

Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” is supposed to be a twisted and terrifying novel (I haven’t read it myself). The most recent film adaptation is terrifying, but not quite so twisted. Directed with an eye for atmospheric visuals, good themes, and a lot of creepy fog by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, the movie offers a stunning, if stunted depiction of grief and death quite unlike most anything I have ever seen.

“Pet Sematary”, for the unaware, has been called King’s scariest novel, and it is about the Creed family, headed by a doctor named Louis (Jason Clarke), who move from Boston to rural Maine. Louis and his wife, Rachel (Amy Seimetz), have two little children, Ellie and Gage, and a family cat, Church (short for Winston Churchill). They discover a pet sematary in their backyard, and beyond that, a place where the dead can be brought back (cats and humans alike).

On the outside, the family is idyllic, but under the surface, a life of trauma hangs over the family. Rachel experienced a horrific incident when she was a child involving her sister (which is overly manipulative due to the grotesque prosthetics/makeup), and Louis is presumed to be messed up by some of the things he has seen as a doctor. Grief and trauma is a common thread wound into the story that comes through strongly until the third act, when it is somewhat left out to dry.

Without spoilers, from what I’ve heard, the original ending of the book that was similar to the movie’s ending, but the way that each arrived there differed. In the book, the ending transpires because of a series of unfortunate mistakes driven by grief, but in the movie, it is more the doing of one evil spirit that was unleashed by one action.

While I usually don’t care if a movie alters its source material, the original events seem like they would have had a more haunting tone and added to the central theme instead of what we got, which is more of a scary zombie story then a story entirely about dealing with grief.

Kolsch and Widmeyer focus too much on the building up scares in the second half of the movie then any real character development. Despite Clarke’s skills as an actor, there aren’t enough scenes that show his character’s love and, eventually, grief, over a certain tragedy. Clarke can’t save the script’s obsession with jump scares and scenes of suspense.

Speaking of which, there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of formulaic horror movie scenes. I mean scenes where there is scary music, and then the music drops out, and a character is walking forward, and you only hear their footsteps and creaking, and then either a jump scare happens or it is delayed until it happens moments later. The jump scares are of course accompanied by very loud and shrill music. These scares end up becoming more manipulative than they should be. The real haunting power of the story should be the family’s sadness and what Louis does because of it.

“Pet Sematary” does have a real sense of dread that permeates the entire setting, its characters, and the story arc, brought through with ghostly panache by the eerie cinematography and oft-chilling score. The rural town the characters inhabit is palpably dreadful, even if the characters aren’t always palpably changing.

{★★½☆}