Nicolas Cage tries to protect his two young sons at the tail end of the apocalypse. Here’s our review of Arcadian.
Stories about the end of the world are increasingly popular in both cinema and television. They make particularly potent horror films or shows, but it’s a highly saturated market and it’s tougher and tougher to stand out, which is the biggest challenge director Benjamin Brewer faces with his horror thriller Arcadian.
Nicolas Cage plays Paul, a single father raising two teenage boys in a post-apocalyptic setting. The family lives in a remote farmhouse far away from whatever remains of civilisation, and life seems to be relatively unremarkable during the day, but mysterious creatures attack their house after nightfall.
It’s hard being a teenager in regular society, never mind one that has been completely decimated. One of Paul’s sons, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins), harbours a crush on the girl next door and quickly gets in trouble after he doesn’t make it home by dark.
What follows is a taut, if sometimes a little uninspired, thriller in which Paul tries to find Thomas while Thomas’ brother Joseph (Jaeden Martell) keeps guard at home. Nothing about Arcadian’s plot is particularly surprising, but there are some real stylistic flourishes here, including a stellar opening sequence that follows Paul as he tries to find safety with his two infant boys.
Brewer comes from a VFX background, having recently worked on Everything Everywhere All At Once and as suspected, the effects and creature design in Arcadian are first class. In fact, the creatures are probably Brewer’s biggest asset and strength. Without spoiling too much of the narrative, the monsters have a unique design and they’re thoroughly unsettling. It’s a shame they seem almost secondary to the family drama, which is a little stilted and unimaginative.
Herein lies Arcadian’s biggest issue. Everything Brewer serves up has been done to death and the family dynamic isn’t fleshed out enough for the film to make an impression on that front. At barely 90 minutes, even less without the credits, Arcadian might be an example of economical filmmaking with its almost single-location setting and minimal cast, but it’s at the expense of narrative and thematic depth.
The cast aren’t at fault though. Cage is, as expected, compelling and believable as the world-weary Paul, but isn’t awarded much to do. Cage brings a lot of gravitas to his part and manages to give off a distinct sense of history for the character, even if the film around him doesn’t always manage to do the same.
The young actors portraying Thomas and Joseph have even less to work with. Jaeden Martell, known for his roles in It and Knives Out, is certainly capable of handling more than he’s given on the page. The two boys have more distinct personalities than Cage’s Paul or Thomas’ crush Charlotte, but they’re frustratingly thin too. Arcadian is so plot-driven that we never quite get a sense of how they fit into the world around them.
While watching Arcadian, I kept thinking about John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place. Both films are essentially about family, but Krasinski’s film manages to find the balance between keeping the mystery of the surrounding world alive and giving us fully-rounded characters with strong personalities and motivations. Arcadian feels like a decent first draft of a better film and the talented cast certainly elevates things.
Arcadian is a perfectly fine post-apocalyptic thriller, but it’s infuriating precisely because there’s so much potential here. Brewer proves to be able to conjure up great images on the screen and there’s a couple of wonderfully scary scenes here, but thematically, Arcadian is on thin ice.
Arcadian is in UK cinemas on the 14th June.
