Directors: Kevin
Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer
Notable Cast: Jason
Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence, Hugo Lavoie, Lucas Lavoie,
Obssa Ahmed, Alyssa Brooke Levine
Before leaping into 2019’s latest entry into the Stephen
King renaissance, it’s perhaps best to start by laying the groundwork and
context towards how I feel about the original Pet Sematary material. The book is terrifying, dark, and heavy,
although it is hardly perfect (that’s blasphemy, I know,) it’s also a powerful story
that is ripe for cinematic elements. The first Pet Sematary film from 1989 is even further away from perfection,
utilizing some great atmosphere and terrifying imagery to power through a script
that is massively problematic and muddled with needless subplots. The reason it’s
necessary to know this is because this newest version of Pet Sematary certainly assumes its audience has either a) see the
previous film b) read the book or c) both. In many ways, it plays on the
expectations of the audience by playing up or down certain elements to get the
audience to feel or move in a certain way. Like a lot of things in the Pet Sematary universe, this plays out as
a blessing and a curse. Like its dual source material, this film struggles to
find perfect balance of scares to narrative theme and ultimately stumbles
further into a middle of the road approach than expected. Pet Sematary is still a thoughtful and often dark decent into the meaning
(or meaninglessness?) of death with some impactful moments, but it just doesn’t
reach the heights that it might have in the end.