Director: Lindsey Beer
Stars: David Duchovny, Pam Grier, Jackson White
Credit to Pet Sematary; through two movies and a ghastly remake its an evidently enduring Stephen King property that has yet to leave an indelible trace of itself on the popular consciousness. I’ve seen all three extant films and push comes to shove I’d be hard pressed to recall to you in any detail a key moment, visual or even a memorable character. In fact, prior to viewing this straight-to-streaming prequel, I had a long think about the basic concept of the series and found myself struggling. Here’s Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, though, existing regardless, with a surprisingly strong cast of seasoned performers bolstering its draw.
We’re back in Ludlow, Maine. It’s 1969. Via gravelly voiceover, Jud (Jackson White) sketches a reminder that we’re dealing with cursed ground that resurrects the dead as soulless facsimiles, before veteran Bill Baterman (a haggard David Duchovny) pays a nighttime visit to the same site to bury an unseen someone who seems likely to be his own son Timmy (Jack Mulhern) returned from a tour of duty overseas. Tensions of service, responsibility and the ongoing Vietnam war underscore Lindsey Beer’s movie as our narrating Jud prepares to leave town to join the Peace Corps. having been skipped over the draft yet again thanks to his meddlesome family.
War – and mankind’s cyclically violent nature; an inability to escape the same impulses and mistakes – is mirrored in the moves of the townsfolk. The dangerousness of the titular burial ground is well-known amongst a protective few, yet still Bill is compelled to misuse it to mollify his own grief, causing a spiral of violence to inexorably spread out from himself and walking corpse Timmy. A finale in the tunnels beneath the town feels like we’re literally witnessing the war at home.
From the off the dialogue has the New England patter of King, making it feel of a piece with the author’s interconnected universe (both literary and cinematic). Bloodline is bolstered by its litter of interesting and diverse subsidiary characters both young and old. Forrest Goodluck – so good in The Miseducation of Cameron Post and How to Blow Up A Pipeline – is on hand as paranoid stoner Manny (paired well with Isabelle Star LaBlanc as his sister Donna), while the older generation is well represented by the aforementioned Duchovny, the legend that is Pam Grier as mailperson Majorie Washburn and Mike Flanagan mainstay Henry Thomas as Jud’s father Dan Crandall.
First time feature filmmaker Beer (who has a surprising number of future projects already in the pipeline) mounts a sturdy if unspectacular production. Bloodline looks handsome enough for a fourth entry in a mildly successful horror franchise, especially one dumped into the wilderness of Paramount+, but if that sounds like damning it with faint praise, well, it is. This may be a nominal improvement on Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s banal clusterfuck but its still liable to vanish from the collective consciousness just as fast as the prior movies.
Largely this is thanks to a script that mostly plays it safe in spite of its more interesting set of thematic targets, resurrecting played-out motifs of spirals, stiff joints, bumps in the night and a compulsion to have characters repeat the mantra “sometimes dead is better”. At its worst Bloodlines can feel like its own shambling lifeless reanimation of Mary Lambert’s more sparkling entries. Beer plays a lot of her conventionally tense moments in near darkness, too, something which – in combination with pacy editorial choices – can make some sequences indistinct and confusing when watched on a TV or laptop screen. The film’s recurring sunflower imagery is pretty and striking, but unfortunately also reminiscent of another undernourished horror franchise entry of recent years. Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre got there first.
A diversion back to the settler times is among the most potent and intriguing portions of the film, suggesting that this prequel didn’t nearly go back far enough. Beer feels more energised and visually engaged in this section than anywhere else, and a sustained and disciplined folk horror piece might’ve been much more successful than the mid-20th century missive we’re ultimately offered.
Still, we’re dealing with what is rather than what might’ve been. For the here and now this is a perfectly serviceable expansion of the lore surrounding Pet Sematary, though its almost the very definition of inessential.
The Lost Highway Hotel 