Arcadian (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Post-apocalyptic horror might be tiring out, but that doesn't mean there aren't still new titles worth watching. Arcadian adds almost nothing new to the subgenre, yet it still manages to feel fresh, relevant, and inspired in most of its choices. Released this past spring with almost no fanfare, this ferocious and evocative little gem of a survival horror action movie metafictionally contemplates its own place in our ever-changing world of gods and monsters.

Clearly taking inspiration from A Quiet Place, the film begins with some kind of apocalyptic event as we follow Paul (Nicolas Cage) scavenging for supplies in an abandoned back alley as the sounds of explosions, sirens, and screams echo from a hidden catastrophe offscreen. We immediately jump forward fifteen years, when his two infant sons Joseph and Thomas are now in the throes of puberty, having been raised as brave and necessarily self-sufficient men. Their childhoods stolen, they have never been afforded the luxury of irrational or emotional thinking; survival is their only daily activity. Their ramshackle farmhouse is dilapidated, and they spend each day scavenging and hunting, bringing back wood, and generally eking out an obviously not sustainable life. One wonders how they've managed this long. Hints of a pandemic that wiped out civilization belie the more visceral threat of nightmarish monsters that attack only at night and have, thus far, been unable to break into the farmhouse.

The characters are as bare bones as they come, making this film less a dramatic thriller than something resembling a parable or even fable. Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) is a risk-taker, traveling farther away from home and returning closer to sunset than Paul dictates is safe. He's endeared himself to their closest neighbors, the Rose family, for whose daughter Charlotte (Sadie Soverall) he harbors a crush, and whose property is much nicer/newer/better maintained. Meanwhile, Joseph is more intellectual and prudent, working independently to solve existential puzzles and seeming eager to live a life beyond minimalist survival. He gets a utility vehicle working to help them, having labored in secret, and that day Paul takes him out to teach him to drive in one of the film's most charming scenes. These men love each other and respect each other, and they will be sorely tested.

That night, after breaking their mandate to fetch wood and return home, Thomas falls into a ravine as he runs home through the woods, knocked unconscious with a concussion as the monsters close in. Paul goes out to save him, prepared to fight off the creatures until dawn, in a Christological act of self-sacrifice that leaves Joseph home alone to batten down the hatches. While you might expect the action of father and injured son in a wooded crevasse at night fending off monsters with light that seems to harm or scare them to be the action highlight of the midpoint of this blissfully quick film, it is in fact not. And this is where director Benjamin Brewer and his team shine.

The filmmakers repeatedly zig when we expect them to zag, which is why this film is such a pleasure to experience. With an almost always handheld camera floating around wait-height, our approach to this world feels like a step or two shy of cinéma vérité or as if Terrence Malick made a Quiet Place installment. It's not always called for -- I felt as nauseated as I do in the Bourne films, for reference, which I can't stand -- and while it does force an atmospheric tension, a story like this needs so little of that packed on through delivery as its entire premise is tense enough. In the sequence above, the dramatic focus is not the fight for survival amidst nocturnal assailants but on Joseph, who falls asleep in his house after failing to secure a single aperture. When a mostly unseen monster enters, we're all but screaming for the boy to waken, though we dare not as sound is sapped from the film. Without spoiling what happens in this extended wide shot that nearly had my eyes melting in horror, suffice to say that directorial bona fides have been earned.

And what monsters! I'm hoping the designers have described how and why and what exactly their process and vision was, but I've not searched for that insight yet. Rather, I'll rely on the raw horror of what we see -- and don't see -- to tell you simply that these are devastatingly effective fear machines. To describe the monsters as perhaps some kind of elongated primate with skullish faces that might be tribal masks is to severely understate the sheer alien horror they instill. In fact, more than once I thought of xenomorphs, both due to things that protrude and project from their bodies and due to their M.O. of tunneling and digging en masse. These things are clearly well-developed, and so our inability to dwell on them visually or even see much of them at all isn't Brewer saying "less is more" due to ineptitude or low budget but rather due to the somewhat realistic problem of being able to see dark creatures that only come out at night and move deadly quickly. Our glimpses of them are also all our heroes have been able to see.

The lack of mediocrity in creating these things, which are also either all unique or develop in alarming and terrifying ways over time, more than makes up for occasional flat moments or extended sequences of mise en scene and ratcheting up of melodrama. Thankfully, we aren't bogged down by those moments, even if ten or fifteen minutes could have been shaved off this flick. We're given enough information that by the time our characters are in trouble, we care about their survival; when we see what they're up against, we doubt they're all going to make it out alive as things keep going wrong. But, and this is where I'll lose some folks, Nic Cage is really the hero of this movie for me. I've never much liked his acting or his real life persona, but in this he knows to really rein in his usual gonzo antics. In fact, he's so rivetingly grounded and withdrawn in this that I respect him a lot more than I ever have. He knows that to best serve this story and his co-stars, he has to be the sane, calculated, safe space in a film of wild frenzy, and he serves exactly that with nothing superfluous to surprise us. An early scene has him describing what he believes their future will be to Joseph and, brief as it is, it's so densely layered behind doubt and untruth and concern and comfort that I had to pause and rewatch it no fewer than three times.

There's not much to chew on in terms of worldbuilding or lore, so anyone who needs information, details, rationale, or backstory will be frustrated by this film. But, as its title suggests, anyone interested in simple idyllic pleasures bring torn asunder by horror and violence will find Arcadian a thoroughly satisfying diversion.