1922, 2017 (A Stephen King adaptation)
I'm going to damn this one with faint praise and say . . . it's fine.
In the year 1922, a farmer named Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) is in a crumbled marriage with his wife (Molly Parker) who wants to sell off their land (HER land) and move away with the couple's son. Wanting to keep the farm and his son, the farmer hatches a plan to murder his wife--winning the son over as an accomplice. But once the deed is done, things go rapidly downhill.
Jane is good in the central role as a man who just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper. Molly Parker is only in the film for the first act, but she does a great job of playing a woman who is crude and not necessarily kind, but also . . . she's not wrong about anything she says. The character of the son was the only real misfire for me. Teenagers can be moody and mercurial, but Henry comes across as too obnoxious and whiny to be all that sympathetic.
I also felt myself getting worn down by the amount of animal death/suffering/cruelty. It's part of this concept of what it means to destroy a person (and usually a male character) by taking away everything he owns/loves. The problem I have is that the film frames so much of this in terms of how it impacts James. It is not their suffering that is centered, but rather the toll it takes on HIM. At a certain point I was like "JUST LEAVE THE COWS ALONE!!!!"
There's just not enough of a compelling character arc within the story. Things just . . . keep getting worse. And the horror aspect (rats that emerge from every possible pipe or crack, for example) wasn't quite impactful enough to make a strong impression.
I've seen two other King adaptations semi-recently (
Gerald's Game and
Doctor Sleep), and this was the least effective of them.
I haven't read the novel on which it is based, so I can't say to what degree it's a source material issue or an adaptation issue or some mix of the two.