| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: April 5, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
19
Mixed:
19
Negative:
4
|
Watch Now
| Stream On |
|
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
Mar 17, 2019
Although the changes to the source material are guaranteed to polarize some Stephen King fans, Pet Sematary bucks the remake trap of simply paying homage to an iconic piece of horror. Instead, it makes drastic changes to the plot so it can ultimately go more complex with its themes. That’s a hell of a trick to pull off. Sometimes, different is better.
Read full review
Mar 17, 2019
Its terrifying story about death still leaves audiences with much to think about long after the credits roll, and the twists that lead to a new ending are fun to follow. Thirty years after the original movie frightened audiences, its source material has given new life to one of the best Stephen King adaptations in the past decade.
Read full review
The GuardianApr 1, 2019
It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.
Read full review
Mar 18, 2019
Pet Sematary balances humor, drama, and horror believably while exploring the inner turmoil of a seemingly ordinary couple; though the script does not go far enough in establishing their new life and dodgy special effects hurt some scenes. Happily, the cast makes up for these flaws with great turns, lead by Jeté Laurence, whose performance is reason enough to watch the film.
Read full review
Apr 3, 2019
It may seem damning with faint praise to call Pet Sematary just a pretty good horror film, but given how many years we’ve been devoid of quality Stephen King adaptations or wide-release genre films, fans should be pretty thrilled with what Kölsch and Wideyer have accomplished. There’s more than enough here to please horror enthusiasts and die-hard King fans alike.
Read full review
The PlaylistMar 17, 2019
The Observer (UK)Apr 8, 2019
Apr 5, 2019
Pet Sematary is beautifully acted, suspensefully paced, competently staged, and overall is pretty successful at delivering that chilling sense of unease and redolent grossness that the best adaptations of Stephen King’s horror stories do. Yet its departures from the source material and from the previous, 1989 adaptation are lateral moves at best, and its capacity to ultimately deliver on the promise of its premise is middling — though not any more so than in the book or the previous adaptation.
Read full review
Apr 1, 2019
As with all Stephen King stories, there are resonant universal themes running through Pet Sematary; guilt, grief and trauma fuel this tale of a family who move to the countryside and become embroiled with an ancient evil. Yet these are buried deep under a mudslide of horror cliches — jump scares, creepy kids, expositional newspaper headlines — that reduce this to just another run-of-the-mill horror remake.
Read full review
Apr 4, 2019
It’s not plot deviations from King’s novel that hamper Pet Sematary. It’s that, from early on, Kölsch and Widmyer, rely less on the detailed accumulation of atmosphere that King built his tale on, than jump cuts and music cues to build suspense. It puts Pet Sematary on a more familiar genre track.
Read full review
Apr 4, 2019
Pet Sematary finesses some of the bumpy narrative moments from the original, but where it forges its own path is in rewriting Ellie's story. This is initially intriguing, but it ultimately reveals itself to be the less original choice, relying on horror archetypes and tropes we've seen before.
Read full review
Apr 5, 2019
I’m a pretty easy scare, but I sat through this Pet Sematary mostly unbothered. Which is certainly not the takeaway one should have from an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, let alone the one that King has said frightens him more than anything else he’s written. In this new film, you almost can’t see what he was so afraid of.
Read full review
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
