The fear of being lost is surprisingly evergreen In The Tall Grass.
Tall grass has long held a primal terror, inherited from our ancient ancestors who learned the hard way that predators could hide in any numbers within its impenetrable depths. Spielberg understood that when he put raptors in the tall grasses of Isla Sorna in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. In The Tall Grass, adapted by Vincenzo Natali from the novella King co-wrote with his son Joe Hill, seems at first glance to till familiar soil: endless fields, lost travellers, unseen whispers in the stalks, but it’s what grows out of that sameness that makes the film oddly hypnotic. This isn’t another small-town cult story in the Children of the Corn mould so much as a hallucinatory riff on the same anxieties: isolation, faith in false prophets, and the human instinct to wander too far from the path in search of meaning.
Driving home across-country, pregnant Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother Cal (Avery Whitted), stop the car to deal with a bout of travel sickness only to hear a child’s cry for help from within the towering grass lining the road. Once they step inside, space and time begin to fold, separating them and trapping them in a verdant labyrinth where disorientation feels less like confusion and more like possession. But they’re not the only ones lost in the seemingly endless grassland where even sound can’t be trusted. The Humboldt family, whose cries lured them into the field are also there – and may have been there for a very long time.
Natali, whose work on Cube and Splice marked him as a director comfortable with conceptual claustrophobia, finds a rare confidence here. His camera prowls and soars, capturing the grass not as backdrop but as a gestalt entity, alive, suffocating, and strangely sacred. There’s an elegance in how the cinematography refuses to simply frame panic; lingering on the lush foliage and finding an almost hypnotic flow in the undulations of the stalks as though the field itself were breathing. It’s one of the best-looking King adaptations in recent years, the kind of film where the visuals and the sound mixing threaten to eclipse the story. The overhead shots and wide angles of the swaying, undulating grass are stunning, and the sound mixing of the wind through the stalks is powerfully atmospheric.
As an adaptation, In The Tall Grass stays close to the novella’s spirit of cyclical futility. What King and Hill managed in prose, that spiralling dread of time loops and corrupted faith, is translated with variable success. The film sometimes struggles under its own repetition, even as its characters deliver exposition like prayer, but the commitment to existential horror remains clear.
If there’s a weakness, it’s that the emotional throughline between Becky, Cal and Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) – the father of Becky’s unborn child – meant to anchor the chaos, never quite takes hold. Their relationship feels more sketched than lived-in, a problem that becomes more apparent as the narrative doubles back on itself. Still, De Oliveira gives the film its fragile centre, grounding the metaphysical storm with palpable despair while Patrick Wilson seems to be having the time of his life, performing the kind of charming mania that makes his descent feel like theatre performed for an audience of old Gods.
In The Tall Grass finds its terror in the simplest and most mundane of places, but the grassland’s simplicity is the film’s strongest asset. There’s a deep unease in the immersive feeling of being genuinely lost – a rarity to today’s jaded audience who have become far too accustomed to having pinpoint GPS precision at their fingertips and forgotten what it is to be truly, completely disorientated. That terror is what powers the stronger first hour, while the shift to a more metaphysical menace in the second, slightly weaker half feels less assured. But for a story that might easily have withered on the stalk, In The Tall Grass proves surprisingly evergreen.
