hhonestly, it doesn’t look as bad as post-apocalyptic societies make it out to be. Nicolas Cage should never even get angry in here Arcadian, in his low-key life as a father of two teenagers in the post-collapse landscape. They have a cozy little house, with books and chess, a dog and a crackling fire in the evening. Okay, yes, of course, Something Unattainable crashes — literally — into their defenses in the depths of the night. But nowhere is perfect, right?
See, I’m learning to cheerfully embrace images of life after the fall of modern human civilization, because it’s clear where we’re headed (I’m glad I’m wrong about that!). And at least this one – from director Benjamin Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nealon – seems to suggest that the Kids are fine, or at least that they’re going to be fine. Maybe Nic Cage and I and our fellow GenXers won’t live through what’s coming, but the kids will. Perhaps? Probably the best we can hope for.
Not much to distinguish Arcadian of the vast subgenre it exists in, but it does what it does well, and its few standouts are solid and welcome. There’s a nice contrast in the teenagers – the bookish homeboy Joseph (Jaden Martel: Knives Out, It: Chapter Two) and reckless adventurer Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) — and a sweet, indulgent affection for both in Cage’s Paul; honestly, Cage (Dream scenario, sympathy for the devil) is much more engaging as a screen presence when he’s a regular person rather than an over-the-top cartoon. And I’m so glad the film sidesteps some obvious pitfall clichés: we see in the film’s opening flashback that the boys aren’t Paul’s biological children, but abandoned—perhaps intentionally, but more likely accidentally—babies that he rescues at the beginning of collapse. I was expecting a “You’re not my real father” moment where there’s a conflict between father and sons, but it never happens.
Other little niceties 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, all their lives; they were kept indoors after sunset because of the bad things that come at night. And also the little game that Thomas and Charlotte play where they make up stories about why their world is the way it is: I can’t remember seeing a post-apocalypse movie where the characters don’t understand everyone details of their nightmare predicament, or why it happened, and actually make the mystery a topic of ongoing discussion. Ignorance looks, of course, like what it would be like after global communications and connectivity disappeared, and this lends an uneasy sense of the sea to the environment the film creates, as well as the sense that we are watching myths and legends of a new culture being born, created in real time.
best of all Arcadian features one of the scariest moments I’ve seen on screen in absolute ages, and it takes a lot to scare me. I gasped. I tensed up. I almost screamed from the tension and terror. It includes the creatures. The creatures that come in the night. The creatures we’re never quite sure if they caused the collapse of civilization or were the result of it. Brewer refrains from revealing the creatures for long, only slowly doing so with a drip, drip, drip visual tease until we’re confronted with some strangely disturbing 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 destroyed planet Earth so badly that this it is necessary to survive now.
Um. Maybe the kids won’t be okay after all…
more movies 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]
