“We are grass. We keep dying and coming back.”
I didn’t know what In the Tall Grass was about before I queued it up. Didn’t know it was based on a story by Stephen King. I was content to sign up for a Vincenzo Natali film. But I’ve watched a few too many time-looping movies in recent times for Natali’s adaptation to stand much of a chance with me. There’s a chilling sense of wrongness effortlessly achieved in the early scenes, and the direction is solid throughout, but the underlying story by King and his son Joe Hill just isn’t engaging enough to demand a feature length film. The generic characters, cheap narrative elements, and general fluffiness of the bloated story undercut a presentation that is sufficiently creepy-crawly and palpably evil at times. It’s a decidedly mid-tier horror film, sufficient for a decent night’s frightfest if you’re into that sort of thing.
Like many of King’s works, on which I’m certainly no authority, In the Tall Grass grips you fiercely out of the gate, demanding a strong ending that never arrives. King is great at putting you into strange situations where things just seem slightly wrong at first, and gradually get worse, but he isn’t as adept at bringing his stories to suitable conclusions. Narrative elements that seemed so terrifying in the beginning are revealed to have no coherent thought behind them (other than to scare you), and so the whole project will end up feeling hollow.
The hooks are set in the film’s opening scene. Cal (Avery Whitted) and Becky (Laysla De Oliveira), brother and sister, are stopped by the side of the road where Becky, who is pregnant, is throwing up her lunch. From the endless field of grass on the side of the road, they hear the cries of a young boy who seems to be lost. They decide to go in after him, but soon discover that they too are lost. Not only can they not find one another, but their orientation seems to shift at random. Walking in the direction of someone’s voice will not necessarily bring you closer to them and try as they might, the pair remain separated. We soon meet Tobin (Will Buie Jr.), the young boy who called out to them, along with his father Ross (Patrick Wilson) and mother Natalie (Rachel Wilson). According to Tobin, who walks around with a dead crow in his hand, the grass can only move living things. By holding the dead crow he is able to navigate to some degree. Somewhere in the middle of the field we encounter a large rock protruding from the ground. It has some mystical powers—touch it and your hair will stand on end and you’ll become enlightened, or something. Ross seems to be a total convert, becoming possessed by whatever ancient demon is haunting the field, claiming it has the power to forgive sins and whatnot, and begins terrorizing the others.
While I will halfheartedly argue later that the film feels bloated, I would not have minded some extra time spent developing the nightmare before we are forced to live it out. The characters accept their odd predicament very quickly where a carefully built sense of existential dread would have fit perfectly.
The most effective turn of events occurs when the film “resets” and Becky and Cal pull off to the side of the road again. By employing some tricky writing and setting our characters into some sort of hellish loop, we become uncertain who lured who into the grass, initially. Have they always been stuck in the grass? But it is here that the film becomes a blur of the unmemorable and generic. Characters die and are reborn. Becky’s boyfriend Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) comes searching for them “months” after they left for their trip. Some creepy, grass-headed humanoids pursue the main characters. Cal and Travis have a manhood-measuring contest.
The underlying problem is that this is a short story—one of Stephen King’s throwaway ideas that he probably spent a weekend on. There’s nothing behind the initial spookiness. To try to stretch that out to a feature length film is a futile task. Without a satisfying main narrative, the side stories that fill out the runtime feel empty. When Tobin is finally freed from the clutches of the grass without any explanation whatsoever, and finds himself in the top of the church across the street, we are just left scratching our heads. I suppose it could be some perverted metaphor for Purgatory or something like that. There’s certainly some haphazard religious symbolism thrown around but it doesn’t seem to have any intended meaning other than that we can point and say “hey, look, religious symbolism.” But there’s just not enough substance there for the plot to have any sort of lasting significance.
But one can only take so many twists before an explanation is required. You can’t just throw us into the weeds, make random teleportation a thing, make reincarnation a thing, make time loops a thing, make a demonic rock a thing, make people made of grass a thing, and then pop the kid out the other end and dust your hands off. That’s just lazy storytelling. It’s creepy, for sure. King’s great at that, like I said. But there’s nothing there behind that surface level creepiness. For the brand of horror that this type of story presents, I prefer the low-budget aesthetic of something like Children of the Corn, another King adaptation that mines the same type of backwoods horror as In the Tall Grass.
That being said, I believe there are two reasons that this film might be worth watching. First, it’s technically on point. Natali and his team do a great job with costume design, editing and sound so that the scary moments are very effective. Considering the clichéd and tropey nature of the story, it is honestly surprising how much effort was put into the cinematic aspects of the film. But Natali had his heart set on this story specifically, so I guess it’s his prerogative to overproduce it. I mean, I’m not complaining about how good it is on the technical front, it just seems odd. Second, the acting also exceeds the requirements for a genre film like this. The cast isn’t uniformly top notch, but considering some of the silly situations they find themselves in and conversations they must have, they do a very good job with the material. Patrick Wilson, by now a horror film veteran (Insidious + sequels, The Conjuring + sequels), is especially memorable as Ross Humboldt. He initially presents himself as a happy-go-lucky real estate agent, but as he falls increasingly under the influence of the demonic presence, his shift in mannerisms and his gleeful enmity are legitimately terrifying.
The bottom line is that the source material for In the Tall Grass simply doesn’t seem worthy of a feature. Perhaps if it was whittled down by about half an hour it could have been more effective, but it’s clear that there’s only a short story’s worth of material to work with, mercilessly stretched out. Technically impressive but narratively lacking, it disturbs in the early-going before ambling into shock, gore, and confusion for their own sake. I certainly won’t denigrate the fine technical work that overshoots the bounds provided by the basic premise, but they make the lack of a robust story all the more glaring. Thankfully, Natali and Wilson are able to keep it from becoming a complete mess, but In the Tall Grass is ultimately unsatisfying.