Pet Sematary (2019)

April 6, 2019 10:33 AM

Louis Creed, his wife Rachel and their two children Gage and Ellie move to a rural home where they are welcomed and enlightened about the eerie 'Pet Sematary' located nearby. After the tragedy of their cat being killed by a truck, Louis resorts to burying it in the mysterious pet cemetery, which is definitely not as it seems, as it proves to the Creeds that sometimes dead is better.
posted by guiseroom (3 comments total)

**SPOILERS**

I enjoyed the big change to the ending while I was watching the movie, I think just because it was finally something different (and the kid actress was astounding going from good to evil, which helped). Later I was thinking about how dead people dragging other dead people to the sour burial ground kind of undermines the theme of grief driving Louis to do irrational things that keeps ratcheting up in the original book/movie as I recall. The dead child killing the parents with the intention of bringing them all back as a family of evil undeads is...interesting, I just feel like it's only there to be kind of twisted and scary, I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean.

(It's also been decades since I read the book, so maybe this is all in there and I've forgotten.)
posted by doctornecessiter at 11:54 AM on April 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

I really think this movie would have made more sense if the cat, Church, belonged to another family. Then Louis could plausibly only know that the cat was brought back to life and not that that its reincarnated personality was manifestly evil. Instead, we spend half the movie watching Louis reach the point of wanting to (re)kill Church to keep him from harming family members and settling for an unsuccessful effort to get him out of their lives by dropping him off in a remote area. On top of that, Louis has been repeatedly haunted by the dead student but fails to put two and two together; if the cat belonged to someone else we would understand that as PTSD. So Louis--who is presented to us as a rational man--has plenty of advanced knowledge about exactly what his newly undead daughter will be like, plus all the warnings from Judd, and brings her back to life anyway.
posted by carmicha at 11:12 PM on April 10, 2019 [2 favorites]

It was kind of boring! I've never seen the original movie (but did read the book like 20 years ago), but the father just isn't a very interesting character. As mentioned above, a lot of his motivations don't make much sense. Same for Lithgow's character, who admits that the graveyard already worked poorly for him, but decides to help the family for (???). Admittedly I chose their fireside chat as the time to pee, so maybe I missed some exposition. The mom is interesting, and is the only character with any real depth. Her monster - the sister - is also the best scare in the movie. But she doesn't get as much screen time. And then it just kind of ends. Eh...
posted by codacorolla at 2:10 PM on April 13, 2019 [1 favorite]