Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
After hearing a child screaming for help from the green depths of a vast field of tall grass, Becky, a pregnant woman, and Cal, her brother, park their car near a mysterious abandoned church and enter the field, discovering that they are not alone and, for some reason, they are unable to escape a completely inextricable vegetable labyrinth.
In the Tall Grass adapts Stephen King and Joe Hill's novella with a reasonably eerie premise — a supernatural grass field that disorients and traps its victims — but the film struggles to sustain its central conceit across feature length. The plot becomes repetitive and increasingly convoluted, with time-loop mechanics that feel muddled rather than revelatory. The acting is serviceable, with Patrick Wilson bringing menace as the unhinged Ross, though the other performances are uneven. Visually, the cinematography captures the claustrophobic dread of the grass field well enough, using low angles and disorienting geography effectively in places. The concept is distinctive enough to earn a modest novelty score — a grass-field labyrinth with cosmic horror undertones is a singular setting — but the execution doesn't fully capitalize on it. The ending is one of the film's weakest points, resolving its tangled timeline logic in a way that feels unsatisfying and somewhat arbitrary, undermining whatever dread had been built up.