In the Tall Grass – **½

In the Tall Grass (Vincenzo Natali, 2019) – Full Original – Horror

Brother and sister Cal (Avery Whitted) and Becky (Laysla de Oliveira) are traveling through a desolate rural area on their way to San Diego. Being six months pregnant, Becky is sickened by the smell of Cal’s hamburger. Cal stops the car to let Becky vomit, but does so in front of a field of tall grass. When Becky hears a child in the field calling for help, the two go looking for him. Soon they are pulled into a weird, dark world where they meet Tobin (Will Buie Jr.) and his father Ross (Patrick), both of whom seem to have ulterior motives for calling the siblings into the field. Meanwhile the father of Becky’s unborn baby, Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) comes looking for Cal and Becky and also wanders into the grass.

With It 2 raking in the dough at the international box office, it would be tempting to compare In the Tall Grass, an adaptation of a novel Stephen King wrote with his son who writes under the pen name Joe Hill, to the various cinematic adaptations of King’s novels. But that would be a mistake as there is an equally rich tradition of adapting some of King’s work for the small screen. This was a staple of television in the 1990s, when It was initially adapted as a mini-series that for me was much better than the contemporary films. The decade also saw the adaptations of novels such as The Stand and Sometimes They Come Back, an underrated TV movie that spawned a number of sequels.

It is within this more modest tradition, in terms of production values and commercial ambitions, that we should locate not only In the Tall Grass but also Netflix’s previous King film adaptations (Gerald’s Game and 19221922). In terms of narrative and style all three are minimalist, forgoing expansive settings or heapings of visual effects. In this way the TV work, the Netflix films included, is generally more experimental and fond of some creative risk taking.

Tall Grass is very typical of the Netflix trio and even shares some of their flaws as well, but I will get to those later. For now, let’s talk about the positives. For the first 45 minutes to an hour, the film is a very good horror movie, which uses the setting and premise to terrify you with the anxiety of being lost in the grass with your eyes and ears seemingly playing tricks on you. This is an innate fear that anyone who has gotten even slightly lost outdoors will recognize and the film exploits that fear well.

Also at play in this part of film are two stock characters of the horror film: the creepy kid and the domineering bully father figure. Both are very effective in terms of giving us the willies. Tobin stops being weird at a point and this coincides with the film’s decline in quality, but Patrick Wilson’s Ross continues to be a good villain throughout, mixing evangelical fervor with lechery and physical aggression (look out for a memorably gruesome killing carried out by his character late in the film).

Adding to the horror here is some uncertainty about the characters’ likelihood of getting killed off, and this is based in large part on the actors’ lack of star power. We don’t have the comfort of knowing that any one of them is likely to survive to the end in the way that we would if they were played by known stars. This is a really plus for the film that is derived out of its low budget casting.

If the film is laudable for adopting some of the virtues of its Netflix/King predecessors, it should also be noted that it shares some of their problems. Just as both Gerald’s Game and 1922 went off the rails near the end in terms of plot, so too does Tall Grass. As it unfolds, the film gets hallucinatory as the characters seem to move between different times and spaces. This adds to the horror slightly, but really is more of a distraction as we try to figure out what exactly is going on.

As it proceeds however, the film gets more and more interested in the alternate worlds, time loops and supernatural elements that seem to be at play. These become confusing and just plain old unpleasant, ultimately leaving me hoping the film would end in a way that explained it all, but that didn’t happen. While I didn’t like how explicit Gerald’s Game was with its ending, something equally expository would have actually helped in this case, as the film (as, I image, the novel must) feels like it is somehow unfinished and that nothing was thought thoroughly. Without spoiling it for readers, I also felt like it robbed the earlier dramatic moments of some of their emotional weight, making audiences feel cheated for investing in the characters and events up to those points.    

This was a shame as for me it took the movie from being a 4 star horror movie, which it was for the first hour, to being the 2.5 star horror/fantasy it ended up being. While the film is thus not a great contribution to the canon of televisiual King adaptations, it is still noteworthy that the film was able to take the chances it did, even if they didn’t pan out this time.

 

Netflix Tendencies

Netflix Stars

As mentioned above, this is the third adaptation of a Stephen King novel (co-authored in this case with King’s son Joe Hill, but it is nonetheless King’s name that sold the book and the film) that Netflix has produced as original films. Besides these films, Netflix also branded the series The Mist as a Netflix original outside of the US.

Limited Locations

Nearly all of the film’s action, unsurprisingly, takes place in the same grass field. In this case, the setting helps to create a great deal of claustrophobic tension, so a material limitation was turned into an advantage by the film-makers. In this way, the film sits well alongside some of Netflix’s other wilderness horrors/thrillers, like The Ritual or Calibre as well as the other Stephen King films mentioned previously, both of which featured varying degrees of claustrophobia, with 1922 in particular using rural landscapes well.  

Small Cast

Unrecognizable “Grass People” (as they are termed in the credits) notwithstanding, the core cast of the film consists of five actors/characters. Of these only horror veteran Patrick Wilson is a recognizable actor, with the rest of the actors being varying degrees of new or unestablished. This is thus one of Netflix’s “One Star Wonders”. For what it’s worth, one can see some promise in pretty much all of the actors, with Laysla de Oliveira being the standout. Will Buie Jr. may have to worry about typecasting however. He is very good here as the creepy kid and his eyes in particular help in this regard. The problem is that he looks so creepy here that it is difficult to imagine him playing any other kind of role in the future.