In The Tall Grass - A Dark and Twisted Flick Streaming Now!
In The Tall Grass was directed by Vincenzo Natali, based on a novella written by Stephen King and Joe Hill, and stars Laysla De Oliveira, and Avery Whitted as Becky and Cal, a brother and sister who stop on the side of a road in rural Kansas after hearing a boy’s cry for help, and venture into a field of tall grass where they soon discover that there is no way out…and that something evil lurks within. Oh, and the movie also has Patrick Wilson in a soooo not Ed Warren (The Conjuring) role. Seriously…this guy is amazing in this film…
So, what did I think of this movie? First off, let me just say that this one was a long time coming. I had heard the reviews of it before, I had seen the trailers, I saw the hype surrounding it, but for some reason I just let it sit in my Netflix queue for a long time. I guess I didn’t want the hype to ruin it for me like some other movies did (looking at you Star Wars: The Phantom Menace…) Well, I finally decided to pull the trigger and what I found was a film that really does mess with your head in a good way.
I was kind of impressed with how this film made me feel throughout, especially since it takes place in a friggin’ patch of tall grass. This movie made me feel claustrophobic and isolated, even before all the messed-up stuff started happening. I gotta give credit here to the cinematographer because these scenes were extremely effective at setting the tone. The one thing that I will say took an entire point off my final score though…was also the cinematography. Like, I’ll give them credit for setting a creepy as hell tone and making me feel isolated, but then there are scenes at night that are so poorly lit, that I couldn’t tell what I was watching at all. There’s a fight sequence where I legitimately thought someone had died, only to see the same character a few seconds later alive and well…it was confusing me even more than the plot of this film.
The acting here is top-notch, every actor giving it their all and performing at the top of their game. Patrick Wilson in particular stole the entire movie for me. I think aside from his portrayal of Ed Warren in The Conjuring-verse, this is his best role to date. The other thing I loved about this movie was the absolute mind-fuck that it is. There are things going on in this patch of grass that make absolutely no sense, but by the end when all is revealed, you’re sitting there just in awe at how messed up everything is. There are some absolutely brutally violent and disturbing scenes in here that actually made me say “what the fuck” a few times out loud, and that’s hard for a movie to do to me these days.
In the end, this movie definitely lived up to the hype for me. It had some solid performances, some ‘WTF’ moments, a disturbing plot, and some great blood and gore. The movie is carried by its simplistic nature, location, and incredible feelings of isolation that I have to give it my recommendation. It’s on Netflix now so check it out!
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