Warning: The following contains mild spoilers for In the Tall Grass.
One of the weirdest corners in the Stephen King multiverse, In the Tall Grass has everything.
There's grass, mud, more grass, time travel, true love, eye stabbings, skull smashings, incest, cannibalism, grass again, and a mustachioed Patrick Wilson repeatedly saying, "Real estate's the game!" like a creepy step-dad at the neighborhood block party.
Suffice to say, writer-director Vincenzo Natali's story of tourists lost in a field is a strange one.
It's a great story — short, stark, and awful.
Loosely based on King and son Joe Hill's novella of the same name, Natali's adaptation isn't a complete departure from standard King fare — but it's not what Netflix subscribers who loved 1922 and Gerald's Game were probably expecting.
As first told by King and Hill, In the Tall Grass is a chilling meditation on the futility of existence.
Cal (Avery Whitted) and Becky (Laysla De Oliveira), two siblings on a cross-country road trip, are stopped alongside a remote stretch of Route 400 when they hear a boy crying for help. Unable to see the boy beyond the overgrown grass lining the road, the two decide to search for him, but become hopelessly lost. They soon learn that the field they've entered is an inescapable hell, populated by others as doomed as they.
The green enclave decimates relationships, forcing characters to turn on one another with venomous rapidity. The descriptions of the atrocities that occur there are disturbing, and the unanswered questions they bring haunting. It's a great story — short, stark, and awful.
Netflix's take is a bit more involved.
As enthusiastic and ill-conceived as any r/stephenking theory thread, In the Tall Grass circa 2019 plays more like fan fiction than an adaptation.
Travis (Harrison Gilbertson), a character mentioned only briefly in the original text, becomes an underdeveloped hero. Ross Humboldt (Patrick Wilson), the story's secondary antagonist, is transformed into a spigot for King-isms and metaphor regurgitation. The lost boy, Tobin (Will Buie Jr.), is contorted beyond recognition with an out-of-place optimism as startling as any monster.
As brilliant as it is stupid, Natali's take on King and Hill's work is a doozy.
Entirely new for the film are a bunch of CGI'd crows and grass creatures, with bizarre hallucination sequences to underscore their menace. Also original: Everyone taking a trip to a bowling alley, Cal suddenly developing "a thing" for his sister, and a woman's head getting popped open Oberyn Martell-style because why not.
Finally, there's that twist ending, as plot hole heavy as it is unnecessary.
Naturally, I loved all of it.
As brilliant as it is stupid, Natali's take on King and Hill's work is a doozy. It's unclear why he and his fellow creators couldn't sort out where to stop expanding the source material or if they even wanted to. Still, it's a fun watch that will satisfy anyone eager to enjoy a cinematic interpretation of this weird and wonderful world.
The greatest achievement of Netflix's In the Tall Grass is the attention it brings to the original story. The second greatest? All the shenanigans it got to pull along the way.
In the Tall Grass is now streaming on Netflix.
Topics Netflix Reviews Stephen King
