Review | Pet Sematary film review: Stephen King horror resurrected with horrifying new adaptation
- Remake sticks faithfully to King’s popular novel resulting in the film being among the best adapted from the famous author’s work
- Young actor Jeté Laurence’s brilliant performance is one of the film’s highlights
4/5 stars
Rather like the storyline, Stephen King’s grisly 1983 book gets re-animated for this second cinematic adaptation. The original movie, arriving in 1989, was scripted by King and featured Herman Munster himself, Fred Gwynne.
Here, co-directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch do not try anything too fancy, sticking to the premise closely as a doctor and his family move into a new home in Ludlow, Maine. The result is surprisingly effective.
Played by Jason Clarke, Dr. Louis Reed is a rational man who does not believe in the afterlife. But that changes when he, wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and kids Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and Gage (Lucas Lavoie), arrive at their new home, a sprawling property that even includes a pet cemetery (misspelled as “sematary”) where local kids come to bury their beloved animals.
But something is clearly amiss: Rachael is soon haunted by childhood visions of her crippled sister while Louis starts seeing things after failing to revive a fatally wounded patient. The story then gets really freaky when the family cat Church is run over and old-timer neighbour Jud (John Lithgow) escorts Louis to the cemetery.
Instead of putting the feline to rest with the other creatures, he takes it to a stone circle further on; within hours, Church has returned from the dead, now a vicious creature with wiry hair and demon-like eyes, who immediately scratches Ellie and tries to attack Gage. “Sometimes dead is better,” mutters the foolhardy Jud, who will soon begin to regret his meddling in the occult.