While Nicolas Cage gets a proper hero’s moment or two in director Benjamin Brewer and writer/producer Mike Nilon’s Arcadian, the post-apocalyptic creature feature belongs to its young stars. Playing like a cross between a poignant coming-of-age story and intense survival horror, Arcadian does just enough to set itself apart from similar fare. However, its ultimate appeal and magic lie in the inventive monster designs and the thrilling action set pieces they inspire.
For fifteen years since an unexplained global event decimated the population, Paul (Nicolas Cage) has raised his two sons, Joseph (Jaeden Martell, Y2K) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins, “Lost in Space”), to keep constant vigilance as they maintain their isolated, fortified farm. The family unit spends their days preparing for nightfall; they face unrelenting attacks every night from a mysterious, lethal threat. When Thomas doesn’t return home before dusk one day, Paul leaves the safety of the farm to find him.
It sets off an intense chain of events that threaten everyone’s survival.
Cage plays Paul with a stern seriousness. Paul is a strict but loving parent who spends his entire existence trying to impart responsibility to his sons while teaching them everything he knows to be self-sufficient. Joseph takes to Dad’s lessons like water. He’s eager to learn, especially when it comes to thwarting their nightly visitations by strange monsters. Joseph’s brother Thomas is more of an impulsive dreamer with a crush, Charlotte (Sadie Soverall). Brewer captures their personalities and daily routines with almost banal peace through wide shots of the pristine countryside captured by handheld photography to further instill naturalism. Even the calming, melodic score can be disarming, more fitting of an indie drama than a genre feature.
By night, though, Brewer dials up the intensity and removes any sense of safety through a number of suspense-filled, claustrophobic encounters. The filmmaker smartly withholds any glimpse of his creatures at first, then reveals more about their behaviors and look piecemeal. While the camerawork frequently obscures them a bit too well, especially during action heavy sequences, the wait to see these monsters in their full glory is worth it. How they move and behave winds up intriguing even more than their unique design.
Brewer’s execution of this strange new species and their grotesque, intelligent hunting style offsets the familiar trappings of the dystopian narrative. Arcadian adheres to many of the tropes when it comes to its human characters, making it tougher to avoid comparisons to similar fare like A Quiet Place. While the creatures themselves are so well done that they need no exposition, the world-building is too scant. The audience knows only as much as its characters, but the minimalist approach here also doesn’t offer much in the way of details to draw our own conclusions or fill in gaps. The film tries to maneuver around this with a confusing opening and a later conversation between teens, pondering about what event changed the world when they were born, but neither gives any real sense of this world beyond the immediacy of monster home invasions.
At its heart, Arcadian explores the timely ways in which a new generation has inherited a world at its absolute worst and most ravaged. It’s at its most effective when the teens are forced into action horror moments, evading or confronting bizarre, scary creatures head-on. Cage steps back to let his young co-stars each get crowd-cheering moments in their tension-filled bid to survive by any means necessary, though he provides enough backbone to ensure their success. Arcadian may not fully work as a whole, at least where the drama is concerned, but it more than succeeds as a thrilling monster movie with one of the coolest new movie monsters in recent memory.
Arcadian made its world premiere at SXSW and will release in theaters on April 12, 2024.
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