Netflix does well by Stephen King’s short story
The Netflix model of film production is a tricky one. On one hand, it can be hard to keep up with the number of original films and television shows within the app. For reasons that are known only to them, their suggestion algorithm is complicated.
Meant to be predictive based on viewing habits, it has a tendency to pigeonhole users into specific genres, meaning that it can be hard to learn about new content within the app if you haven’t watched the right movies to get them to show.
Netflix supplements this by advertising specific films and shows, but generally only with content it believes will be massively successful, meaning smaller films can get lost in the glut of garbage that can be found on the service.
On the other hand, Netflix has led the way in making some very high quality films, films that wouldn’t get a major release anywhere. More specifically, they’ve brought a lot of Stephen King stories to life in exciting and profound ways.
King’s material has been adapted frequently to film, but much of it was done in a poor, movie-of-the-week sort of way. Netflix hasn’t done that. With films like Gerald’s Game and 1922, Netflix has given some of King’s smaller stories a home.
This month, they’ve done it again, with an adaptation of King story co-written by his son, the equally talented Joe Hill, called In the Tall Grass. It’s a film that does everything a King short story should.
As with many King stories, the film takes a fairly simple premise and turns in on its ear. Becky DeMuth (Laysla de Oliveira) is several months pregnant and in crisis. Along with her brother Cal (Avery Whitted), she is on a cross-country trip to meet with a couple interested in adopting her baby, since her boyfriend Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) has told he can’t be a father.
Becky gets carsick somewhere on the side of the road in Kansas, near a large field of tall grass beside the abandoned Church of the Black Rock of the Redeemer.
As Cal gets out of the car to check the map, Becky hears the voice of a young boy pleading for help in the tall grass. Unseen, he tell them he’s lost and he can’t find his way to the road. Becky and Cal enter the grass to help the boy, only to discover that not everything is as it seems.
The grass whispers and shifts in the wind, and so do those who enter the field. Becky and Cal are separated and time appears to no longer move in a linear fashion. Nothing stays the same, except for the gently swaying grass, as far as the eye can see.
The film benefits greatly from the careful eye of director Vincenzo Natali. Natali is known for his 1997 picture Cube, which was a claustrophobic sci-fi mystery about people trapped in a dangerous, ever shifting maze.
In the Tall Grass has that same feel—a small cast of characters, endlessly searching for a way back home, getting more and more lost, and more and more paranoid.
Of course, as with most King stories, there’s an element of strange cosmology, of ancient ritual and disturbing ideas. The film differs from the short story in some significant ways.
Natali makes the ending a bit more hopeful that the original story and adds a time loop element, which helps raise the stakes and make the setting more foreboding and strange.
In addition, the film works well due to the performances of the actors, particularly Patrick Wilson as the unsettling Russ Humboldt.
Films like In the Tall Grass are what makes services like Netflix worthwhile. That these types of stories can find a distribution model and financing for a competent, capable adaptation can only be a good thing.
Still, the way Netflix hides and fails to promote certain films can be a problem. At times, the app itself is something like a constantly shifting field of grass, one that makes it difficult for users to find quality content.
Hopefully, when Disney’s new streaming service Disney+ takes half of their users in November, Netflix will lean into financing more films like In the Tall Grass and makes it easier to find them. It might be Netflix’s only hope.