Honestly, it doesn’t look so bad, as postapocalyptic societies go. Nicolas Cage never even has to go all Cage-ragey here, in Arcadian, in his downscaled life as dad to two teen boys in a postcollapse afterscape. They have a cosy little cottage, with books and chess and a dog and a crackling fire in the evenings. Okay, yes, sure, Something Unfathomable comes a’knockin’ — literally — at their defenses in the depths of night. But nowhere’s perfect, amiright?
Look, I’m learning how to cheerfully embrace depictions of life after the downfall of modern human civilization, cuz it’s clearly where we’re headed (happy to be wrong about this!). And at least this one — from director Benjamin Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nilon — seems to suggest that The Kids Are All Right, or at least that they’re gonna be all right. Maybe Nic Cage and I and our fellow GenXers won’t survive what’s coming, but the kids will carry on. Maybe? Probably the best we can hope for.
There’s not a lot to distinguish Arcadian from the vast subgenre it exists within, but it does what it does well, and its few distinctive characteristics are solid and welcome. There’s a nice contrast in the teen boys — bookish homebody Joseph (Jaeden Martell: Knives Out, It: Chapter Two) and reckless adventurer Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) — and a sweet, indulgent affection for both in Cage’s Paul; frankly, Cage (Dream Scenario, Sympathy for the Devil) is so much more engaging as a screen presence when he’s being down-to-earth human rather than an over-the-top cartoon. And I’m so glad that the film sidesteps some obvious pitfall clichés: we see, in the movie’s opening flashback, that the boys aren’t Paul’s biological children but abandoned — perhaps deliberately but more likely accidentally — infants that he rescues early in the collapse. I was expecting a moment of “You’re not my real dad” when conflict between father and sons hit, but that never happens.
Other small good things include the reaction of the boys and their young neighbor Charlotte (Sadie Soverall) when they all finally see the night sky they’ve been denied, for their own safety, for their entire lives; they’ve been kept indoors after sunset because of the bad things that come at night. And also the little game that Thomas and Charlotte play, wherein they make up stories about why their world is the way it is: I can’t recall seeing a movie set after an apocalypse where the characters didn’t understand all details of their nightmarish predicament, or why it happened, and actually make the mystery a topic of ongoing discussion. Not knowing seems, of course, like it would be the case after global communications and connectivity disappear, and this lends an uneasy at-sea feeling to the environment the movie creates, as does the sense that we’re watching myths and legends of the new culture being born created in real time.
Best of all, Arcadian includes one of the scariest moments I’ve seen onscreen in absolute ages, and it takes a lot to scare me. I gasped. I tensed up. I nearly screamed from the suspense and the horror of it. It involves the creatures. The creatures that come at night. The creatures that we’re never quite sure caused the collapse of civilization or are a result of it. Brewer holds back revealing the creatures for a long time, only slowly does so with a drip, drip, drip visual teasing until we are confronted with some freakishly unsettling imagery that lets you feel in your bones just how wrong these things are. They are uniquely horrifying, as is the suggestion that humanity has trashed planet Earth so badly that this is what it takes to survive it now.
Hmm. Maybe the kids aren’t gonna be all right after all…
more films like this:
• A Quiet Place [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+ US | Paramount+ UK]
• It Comes at Night [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Kanopy US | Max US]
