A brother and sister enter a field of tall grass to rescue a boy, but they soon realize they cannot escape and something evil lurks in the grass.
Something evil lurks in the grass. Evil grass is something that feels too close for comfort to M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, a film that absolutely destroyed an interesting premise. In The Tall Grass, on the other hand, is not written by Shyamalan; the original novella was written by Stephen King and Joe Hill (a.k.a. Stephen King's son). That makes this the third Stephen King film adaptation to be released this year (following Pet Sematary and It: Chapter Two, with Doctor Sleep still to come). Being directed by Vincenzo Natali, who is quite well-known for his sci-fi horror flicks (Cube, Cypher, Splicer, and Haunter), it adds credibility to this Netflix movie, and it actually ends up working out quite well.
Adapted from King and Hill's novella by Natali, the story has had a number of elements added to it (including an extra character) in order to craft a feature-length film. While some elements work to add layers to the original piece, not everything works that well, and the story ends up on the convoluted side of things.
When you consider that the majority of this film takes place within a field of tall grass, it goes without saying that steps are needed to prevent it from becoming dull and uninteresting. Cinematographer Craig Wrobleski does a superb job with flipping the framing of shots upside down, using overhead and low angles to vary perspectives, and some very fluid tracking shots through the grasses to keep things moving and visually interesting in a film where most of the scenes involve the same background of tall grass.
Where the interest in the film really gets going is when it starts to include elements of fourth-dimension time and space to remove predictability for our group of protagonists caught in the trapped in the confines of this field of tall grass. With unknown parameters, the difficulty and frustration ramps up exponentially, and the repetitive nature of shots become claustrophobic and more effective each time.
The medium pacing of the film comes more from the difficulty in escaping the field than from threats within the field, making In The Tall Grass a survival film as opposed to a horror flick, despite those horror elements still being present, with lack of food, exhaustion, and internal dramas providing more of a threat. Things are slowed down by additional elements added into the later acts of the film, which lead to more questions than answers in the increasingly complicated story.
The acting is quite well done, with the standout performance coming from the most recognisable name on the cast list, Patrick Wilson (Watchmen, Insidious, Prometheus, The Conjuring, and Aquaman) who puts forward a very compelling performance in every regard. Despite the number of supernatural elements in the film, there are not a huge amount of exposition dumps, avoiding the trap of over-explaining things and allowing the viewers to come up with their own answers. Some of the added elements to the characters are less subtle, with specific choices made that appear to be for shock value over forming more engaging content.
While In The Tall Grass does leave you with more questions than answers and has some elements that do little but pad the runtime, it creates a very convincing threat from a very minimal premise, turning a creepy Stephen King story into a time-bending sci-fi trap that excellently utilises a low-budget location and manages to cram several well-executed reveals and a satisfying redemption arc into this film.