October Spooks-Ganza Presents: IN THE TALL GRASS

	In The Tall Grass is a much more recent movie than what I’m used to reviewing here, in that it came out maybe two weeks ago or so. It’s directed by none other than Vincenzo Natali, who made the original Cube, which I’ve lauded as one of my absolute favorites before. Based on a novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill, In The Tall Grass is...interesting, at least. The premise, people get lost in a field of tall grass and hilarity ensues, is fairly high-concept, though there are definitely some hiccups along the way. Mostly to do with trying to stretch a pretty simple idea into an hour and forty minutes of movie, which if you’re willing to sit here for a couple thousand words of rambling I can explain how.
	Anywho, it starts off with a fairly nice overhead shot of a huge field of grass. No prologue, but it does set the scene at least. There’s...grass. Grass and nothing but grass. And a car driving along a dusty road. Given my Ohio upbringing, I’m no stranger to large fields of nothing, and this certainly feels like a big open field in the middle of nowhere. Run down bowling alley, ancient worn down church, and a couple doing the time-honored tradition of exposition bickering. Becky and Cal, their names are, and they’re fifteen hundred miles from San Diego. She’s pregnant, and I immediately assume that they’re husband and wife. Which isn’t true, but that assumption actually feeds in rather nicely to some plot points later on. They hear some kid out in the field of tall grass shouting for help, stop the car, and step into the field to find him.
	Immediately everything goes to shit. And I mean immediately. We’re not even five minutes into the movie and they’re immediately bombarded with the core concept – space and positioning is off in this weird field of grass. They realize this immediately too, by the sounds of their voices moving across from each other, and when they jump, see each other fifteen feet apart, then jump again and see each other thirty feet apart. Bear in mind, this is less than ten minutes into the movie. This movie that’s almost two hours long. It jumps into things pretty damn fast. See, on one hand, this gives it time to play around with its concepts and there’s no sense of “just get on with it already” that I had with The Vault. That being said, it does drag on towards the end there, but overall the sharp jump into horror is a point in the movie’s favor.
	More running around in the field. The grass is taller than any of the people here, so it definitely gives a feeling of isolation and a degree of confusion – much like Cube did, though Cube’s hellish industrial designs and actively malevolent death traps gave it more of a sense of despair than Tall Grass’s endless blanket of green that covers most of the movie. Time passes, though, and it does make good use of nighttime to keep things from being too bland, and also subtly manipulate the character’s and viewer’s emotions. Vincenzo Natali is a good director, and this shines through and saves what could be an otherwise mediocre movie. Cal bumps into Tobin, the kid they heard shouting earlier, and Becky bumps into Ross, Tobin’s father. Apparently Tobin heard someone shouting and followed them into the grass, which is a common ploy it employs to snatch people.
	Tobin works as the standard weird creepy plot exposition character here, or at least for now. He tells Cal that there’s a rock that can teach him how to learn the ways of the field. A weird giant rock with odd carvings in a big clearing. The pioneers used to ride these babies for miles, you know. It’s nighttime when Cal sees the rock, and a low shot of the rock with the moon hanging directly overhead actually gives it a great air of menace. Oh, also Becky’s dead. She lost track of Ross after a backstory-laden conversation and the last we see of her is when she runs into someone stepping out of the grass in front of her and screams. Tobin says ‘too late’ so yeah.
	Morning, and a beat up old truck is trundling around the rode. The guy inside, who we find is named Travis, is gently holding a picture of Becky, so presumably he’s the out of the picture husband. He sees their car parked outside the church and stops to investigate. The church, by the way, gives us this lovely lingering shot of the sign reading “Church of the black rock the redeemer”. Can you see where this is going? I can see where this is going. Bit heavy in the foreshadowing department, especially considering what comes later, but sure. I’ve seen worse. Their car is now covered in dirt, implying that some time’s passed. How it collected more dirt sitting in a parking lot for a couple days than it did driving along a dirt road for a couple days is beyond me, but I get the picture you’re giving us here. He walks into the grass looking for her after checking out the empty church.
	Travis bumps into Tobin. He’s not as creepy, but he still gets to explain the rules of the tall grass, and apparently recognizes Travis. See, much like It Follows, In The Tall Grass has a set of rules that it follows, and spends its time exploring those. This presents the viewer with a sort of puzzle to work out, seeing the facets of those rules and how people interact with them, what you can do in the confines of those rules, and exploring how they work. The grass does not move dead things. If you can’t hear them you get disconnected from them. Rules like this make a movie interesting and are a great way to keep the viewer engaged with the movie. Unfortunately, it does not do as good a job as It Follows in that department. While it does avoid a huge fucking block of raw exposition as the entire concept gets laid out in a single scene, it does change them and add new things throughout the movie. It’s like you’re putting together a puzzle of a unicorn, only halfway through someone gives you two hundred more pieces and you see it’s really a picture of a lion. It’s understandable why they did this, as the movie unfolds in some pretty interesting directions, but at the same time it makes things feel a bit more disconnected and unfocused. It Follows was a very tight movie and used its concept a bit more effectively, while this one evolves over time and creates more of a rising tension in the narrative. The threat isn’t as omnipresent here, but it’s a bit weirder and more mysterious. Hey, if you don’t want me delving into the conceptual elements of horror, you’re reading the wrong reviews.
	Tobin leads Travis to Becky’s desiccated corpse, and vanishes. Next morning, Travis hears shouting. It’s Tobin, only he’s outside the field and on the road. Tobin hears Travis shouting and goes into the tall grass after him, meeting him for the first time. Remember what I said about the movie evolving? Time is just as befuddled in here as space is, apparently. Becky and Cal followed Tobin into the grass, who followed Travis, who was following Becky and Cal. This adds a nice layer to the strangeness of it all, but has a few issues I’ll mention later on. Things get a bit weird from this point on, which is understandable. We’ve seen the basics, now it’s time to push things up a notch. Like I said, it evolves, but it also becomes much more scattered with its narrative as it does.
	Ross, Tobin’s father, finds the rock and touches it, having some unseen epiphany. Hours later, Becky and Cal drive up to the church along the road, hear Tobin shouting, and get out to go investigate the tall grass. Similar to the start of the movie, only this time they hear Travis shouting as well, who uses a dead dog and the “dead things don’t move around” to actually collect himself, Becky, Cal, Tobin together. Not only is there now time shenanigans, but the weird time loop is actually changing. It adds a fantastic element of insanity and unsuredness on what can happen next, but at the same time it means that the movie can pretty much retcon and redo whatever it wants willy-nilly. The rules allow this rule-based horror to change itself around however it feels. Which has some good parts to it, in that it’s difficult to predict what will happen, and some bad parts, in that it lessens greatly the impact of someone dying if they can just come back again. Some good parts some bad parts, on one hand but on the other, both sum up In The Tall Grass pretty well. It’s a heavily divided movie that absolutely shines in some areas but feels like a mess in others.
	Ross finds the group, and now he’s taken Tobin’s place as creepy exposition plot guy. Leads them to the rock, which is apparently at the exact center of the continent and has existed forever and ever and ever. He demands that they touch the rock, but Tobin’s mother Natalie jumps into the clearing and warns them that he’s gone evil. Ross is in full cultist mode now, obsessing over accepting the rock into his heart. He also kills Natalie by crushing her skull between his hands. That’d be a lot more hardcore without the bad CG. Then the chase is on. He also uses the term ‘redemption’ a few times, echoing the church sign along the road, which feels a bit too on the nose for the terms people use to describe their feelings. The rock must be giving them all very specific emotions, I guess.
	The dynamic of the movie changes at this point. The first part of it was a vague, unsettling, background threat of everyone being lost in a hellish area, and this is the direct, actively hostile threat of a psychopath chasing them down. Which is, funnily enough, very similar to The Cube in structure, and for good reason. Deborah Chester, who writes some fantastic books on writing, talks about how you absolutely need a direct, intelligent force opposing the main character. Vague forces of nature like the Tall Grass just don’t work well enough, there needs to be a direct opposition actively working against them, otherwise the plot will lack tension. This doesn’t have to be human, as proven by It Follows, but there needs to be something direct and hostile, and I’m inclined to agree with this sentiment.
	We’re approaching the latter parts of the movie, just when the group breaks down into fighting while being chased by Ross. Travis accuses Cal of having some pretty incestuous thoughts and trying to play the husband for Becky, Becky’s angry that Travis disappeared when he did, so forth and so on. In a narrative sense it’s understandable that this is where emotions fly loose, in what’s usually the utmost point of horror and terror, and it’s important to have characters that people emphasize with, but at the same time it can prove to be an unwelcome distraction from the evil cultist screaming ALL FLESH IS GRASS and hunting them down. The good news is that they find the abandoned bowling alley, which does make for a nice change of scenery. The group breaks down completely and they all go in their separate directions after Cal pushes Travis off the roof.
	Ross catches up with Cal and strangles him, next to a whole bunch of Cal’s corpses. Apparently there’s branching paths and every single one of them leads to Ross killing him. It’s interesting, and the idea of someone suffering a thousand deaths eternally does make for good horror, but the caveat of removing some tension does drag it down a bit. There’s a weird bit of tension between Becky and Travis about him wanting her to get an abortion prior to the movie, but I’m not gonna touch that because it sounds like there’s almost an incredibly out of place pro-life moralizing. Maybe. Who knows. Watch it and make your own decisions, but either way the entire argument was unneeded.
	Shit gets really fucking weird here. Becky finds the rock, and gives birth right in front of it. The ground opens up in front of her and there’s a deep pit with skeletons and writing people covering the sides, which honestly is the highlight horror of this movie. It actually gives a sense of some strange otherwordly horror, the capstone of this bizarre half-sapient field of tall grass. Also Ross, who Becky is currently in her post-birthing haze sees as Cal, feeds her bloody chunks of her baby. Yep. I had the same reaction, it’s fine.
	Travis finds them and kills the everloving fuck out of Ross, strangling him to death with a bunch of the tall grass. Nicely karmic deaths are always fine. Travis realizes the only way out is to touch the rock, receive otherwordly understanding, and use that to transport Tobin out of the field into the church. Tobin walks outside to find Becky and Cal driving up to the field and convinces them not to go in, erasing the entire time loop. Mostly, as it cuts to Travis dying in the midst of the tall grass and Becky making the ultimate decision of not giving her baby away and keeping Tobin as her own family.
	In The Tall Grass is a whole bundle of mixed feelings. It definitely drags on towards the end there, constantly trying to one-up itself with some new revelation or plot problem. Jumping in quickly means it had the opportunity to trim any excess fat and be a very tight package, but it tries too hard hard to keep adding some new element or problem.  Being mostly in eight-foot-tall grass gives it a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, but also gets tiresome by the time you get to the end. Overall, both the Cube and It Follows are stronger, more concise movies, but In The Tall Grass still sits as on the upper end of Netflix horror. Despite being full of ups and downs, that its ups hit hard enough as they do I can’t say I dislike this movie. It’s weird as hell, but also really interesting with what it plays with, and “weird” is hardly a sin in the grand scheme of things. That’s what you get for trying to stretch out a simple novella into a full-length movie, I suppose.