Review: The New Pet Sematary Is Dead in More Ways Than One

The tracking shot that opens Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary somewhat desperately recalls the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film that actually manages to deepen, rather than water down, its Stephen King source material. Both films begin with overhead shots of wooded landscapes that ultimately land on structures designed for human habitation. In Kubrick’s case, it’s the haunted Overlook Hotel, and in Pet Sematary, it’s a pair of neighboring houses—one consumed by flames, and the other still intact but with telling bloodstains smeared all over its front porch.

In the opening sequences of The Shining and this second adaptation of Pet Sematary, the natural world seems indomitable, our human interventions frivolous and naïve in comparison. Both narratives revolve around men succumbing to temptations offered to them by forces greater than themselves, but the comparisons between the two films end there. The questions begged by the opening of Pet Sematary, which is actually more of an epilogue delivered before the narrative action as a kind of reverse cliffhanger, are soon answered in paint-by-numbers fashion as Kölsch and Widmyer race through plot points and jump scares without ever stopping to contemplate the broader implications of the story they’re trying to tell.

Pet Sematary follows the Creeds—husband and wife Louis (Jason Clarke) and Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their eight-year-old daughter, Ellie (Jeté Laurence), and baby son, Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie)—who’ve just moved from Boston seeking the presumably slower pace of rural Maine. Soon after their arrival, they discover on their wooded property a mysterious burial ground for deceased pets. And when the family cat, Church, is run over by a truck on the highway that extends uncomfortably close to the Creeds’ new house, the family’s affable neighbor, Jud (John Lithgow), offers to help Louis put the animal to rest.

After Jud leads Louis deeper and deeper into the woods before finally burying the cat, the old man is the only one who isn’t surprised when Church reappears alive and well, if a little bit more cantankerous than usual. And when Ellie is later hit by another truck during her birthday party—well, you can guess what comes next. “Sometimes dead is better,” Jud says at one point in the film, which makes one wonder why he shared the secret reanimation powers of the burial ground with Louis in the first place. And by the end of Pet Sematary, the audience will likely believe in the truth of Jud’s statement, after even more unfortunate souls have been wrenched back from death only to wreak havoc on the living. But it can also be read as a condemnation of the idea of the remake itself. Why not just let a sleeping dog lie?

Much of the film’s horror is non-diegetic—Rachel’s ghastly and guilt-inducing childhood memories about her sister’s death, Louis’s ghostly visitations from a patient he lost on the operating table—almost as if the landscape here is a liminal space between day and night, the living and the dead. An early conversation between Louis and Rachel becomes prescient when each of their belief systems is subsequently tried by fire. Louis believes that nothing awaits us after the moment of our death, while Rachel insists that something must be waiting for us on the other side. But Louis is the one who refuses to let death have the last word. And while he embraces Ellie’s return from the land of the dead, Rachel rejects what she sees as an abomination, setting in motion the film’s grisly turn toward its inevitable conclusion.

While there are a few narrative deviations from the original story (for one, it’s Gage who dies and returns in King’s novel, as well as in Mary Lambert’s 1989 film adaptation), none of them are really significant or meaningful enough to warrant much afterthought. The new ending, in particular, is a headscratcher of a twist, as the family story takes on new dimensions in the final scene that seem designed only to justify this Pet Sematary’s existence by deviating significantly—and superfluously—from the original text.

Seimetz’s intense take on Rachel’s grief, as well as her rejection of the undead Ellie, is the closest that Pet Sematary gets to exhuming the core anxieties undergirding its central tension: How do we move on from our darkest hours? And what if we can’t move on at all? But while the tools employed by these filmmakers are clearly well-honed and deliberately employed in the service of their desired outcome—a reliably scary horror romp—they’re perhaps the wrong ones for this particular film, the story of which has enough pathos to fulfill the expectations of a great tragedy but ultimately feels like a commercial for something else entirely.