"Don't go into the long grass!" shouts Ajay as the group of mercenaries forge their way through the tropical plain of Isla Sorna, as we see the snake-like tails of velociraptors closing in. Oh wait, I'm sorry, that's the wrong movie. But I definitely quoted it aloud more than once while watching the latest Stephen King adaptation made for Netflix streaming, In the Tall Grass, based on King's novella of the same name.
In what can only be an idea that King wrote in the furious frenzy of a single sitting (with his son Joe), the story goes something like this: Two siblings stop their car on a long stretch of open field near an old church, hearing a boy calling for help. Becky is six months pregnant, and her brother Cal is perhaps a little too protective and attentive. The field appears to be made of tall grass, tall as sunflowers or full-grown corn, and the boy, Tobin, is nowhere in sight. Once they hear Tobin's mother, Natalie, calling out telling her son not to seek help, the siblings enter the grass, quickly becoming separated from each other and hopelessly lost. The four people seem able to hear each other, but their voices will be nearby and terribly distant in only a few seconds' time, even when nobody is moving.
The strangeness of the grass becomes terribly claustrophobic as day progresses toward night. It's hot until it's not, and the thick black mud underfoot makes moving quickly difficult. In one breathtakingly brilliant scene, Cal and Becky seem close enough to each other that they decide to jump in the air to locate each other: one jump reveals about ten or fifteen feet of separation, but the next -- almost immediately afterward -- sets them hundreds of feet apart. But this is no Goblet of Fire hedge maze; it's a sea of grass whose rip currents are swift and utterly undetectable.
Undetectable, that is, until Tobin's father Ross (Patrick Wilson) appears, suddenly, to Becky. He's charming and earnest and a little too creepy to follow, but he claims to know the way and poor Becky needs all the help she can get. Cal meets Tobin, who says over a dead bird that the grass doesn't move dead things. This is where the already weird but delightfully spooky movie takes a slight turn south, prioritizing half-baked pseudo-mythology over fleshing out the considerable present horror. It's fairly obvious, I think, even to those unfamiliar with the novella that this halfway point is where King's source material stops and the film's inventions begin.
I don't want to spoil it too much, but the film works best at its simplest. Director and writer Vincenzo Natali exercises some truly beautiful control over this story with his cinematographer Craig Wroblenski (television shows Fargo, Legion, and Zoo). The visual dynamic is such that I almost -- almost, mind -- wish there were no dialogue at all; the Hitchcockian prioritizing of visual storytelling here sometimes made me forget the characters were usually saying inane or annoying things. I made the mistake of first watching this movie on my phone while exercising, but I rectified it by watching on a larger screen a few days later. Natali directed some episodes of Hannibal and independent and obscure sci-fi/horror flicks that are really lovely, and his directorial abilities are perhaps at their best yet here. This movie demands to be seen on a larger scale. Too bad it won't prove quite narratively smart enough to garner more fans.
I think where the film falters is in the second half, when Natali clearly wanted to do more with the source material. He introduces issues of time loops and thematic concerns of fate and a cultish obsession with a large rock in the field that altogether start to make this movie feel as if it's meant to connect somehow with Children of the Corn. It gets a bit weird and hard to conceptualize, and I think that's because it becomes less relatable. We all understand the horror of being lost in an endless, sentient field, but when it becomes, literally, a sort of hellish chaos or malevolent limbo, we can't possibly feel as intimately connected. Natali might have served a more effective horror piece had he focused on the characters, their isolation, their fear responses, and the ways in which they succeed or fail to escape.
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