Pet Sematary

MFC Review

A cinema classic returns from the dead in Pet Sematary (2019), the most recent film based on the work of the king of horror, the author Stephen King.

Pet Sematary is directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, and stars Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow. The movie depicts the story of the Creeds, a family that moves to a lonely house on the outskirts of Maine, where they find a pet cemetery wrapped in mysteries.

Although its narrative construction is similar to the first version of the story, directed by Mary Lambert in 1989, Pet Sematary doesn’t hesitate to take several creative ideas to tell its own version. The first part of the film presented a series of events that could have been narrated in a more strategic way. Nevertheless, everything improves when the movie moves away from the basic set-up and deepens a little more in the psyche of its characters while facing the supernatural events that are so characteristic of King‘s stories.

The performances are the best part of the film. Through them, we can see conflicted characters, facing their own doubts and questioning their beliefs, bringing a new family dynamics to the cinematographic versions of the story.

Like its predecessor, Pet Sematary fails to fully capture the atmosphere and general horror of the novel on which it is based, but it manages to be a complete film and an interesting proposal within the new wave of films based on the stories by Stephen King, like It (2017), The Dark Tower (2017) and It: Chapter Two, which will be released in September 2019.