Arcadian Review: Unsettling Monsters Buoy Nicolas Cage

Arcadian review: the monsters do the heavy lifting

Creature features live and die by their creatures. That sounds obvious, and it is amazing how many movies do not grasp it. For every Alien or Godzilla there is a pile of Velocipastors and Sharknados, and for every Jaws there are a dozen Jaws 3D. By that standard, Arcadian has already won the first battle.

The structure is classic. A family lives behind boards and locks, the dark outside is the enemy, and the day is for scavenging and repairs. The film uses that rhythm well. Daylight scenes are about small projects and small quarrels, and sundown flips the switch, so that the audience learns to dread the light going orange. A creature feature that respects its own rules this carefully earns trust before the first claw comes under the door.

The Arcadian monsters are some of the freakiest and most unsettling seen in a movie in a while. They are nightmarish: a mix of spiders, wolves and cockroaches with extendable limbs and claws. They also help paper over a pretty standard-issue post-apocalypse survival plot, which is the film's main weakness and its most forgivable one.

Benjamin Brewer directed it from a screenplay by Michael Nilon. It premiered at SXSW on March 11, 2024, and RLJE Films released it in the United States on April 12, 2024. It runs 92 minutes. Production companies were Highland Film Group, Redline Entertainment and Saturn Films, and filming began in Dublin in November 2022.

The review below covers the setup, the creatures and the acting without giving away the third act.

The setup: a farm, two boys and a curfew

Nicolas Cage plays Paul. On the day the world was ending, he found two babies while scavenging and raised them on his rundown little farm. Fifteen years later, the boys are growing up. Thomas, played by Maxwell Jenkins, is eager to see life beyond the farm, especially their neighbors, the Roses, who have a teenage daughter named Charlotte, played by Sadie Soverall.

Joseph, played by Jaeden Martell, is more introverted. He spends his time fixing up scavenged items, such as a broken-down golf cart, and studying the creatures that attack them. Both boys have to be inside by sundown, because that is when they come out.

What the Arcadian monsters do

Night after night, the creatures scratch at boarded-up windows and dig long claws under door frames. Their limbs seem to unfold and extend continually, and the claws can grow and grow. They travel in packs by clumping into a ball and rolling around. As they close in they clack their jaws in a rapid-fire way that seems to mesmerize their prey.

Nobody is sure where they came from. A couple of theories come up, but only inside a game the teens play, in which they badly describe the apocalypse in ten seconds. They suggest a bug mutated by pollution and then attacking humans. It hardly matters, because this is not the kind of movie where plucky youngsters find a cure. It is about surviving.

Why the creature design works

Good monsters are built on a few unsettling ideas, and these have several. The limbs unfold when they should not, the claws keep growing instead of simply swinging, and the packs roll like balls before they open up into animals. Each trait asks the viewer to imagine a body that does not obey normal anatomy. The jaws are the best detail of all. A rapid clatter is a sound as much as a sight, and it plants itself in the ear.

A shaky handheld camera helps. By keeping the creatures partly hidden, the film lets the audience fill in the worst parts, and it makes the occasional clear look land with real force. That is a smart use of limited resources, and it is the choice that most separates Arcadian from the cheap imitators it name-checks in its first paragraph.

How Brewer shoots them

Brewer is either very savvy or very lucky. There is a lot of handheld shaky camera, which is an irritant at first and then turns into an advantage, because it obscures the monsters and makes them scarier, with black fur waving as they skitter about.

He also likes to foreshadow. Thomas leaps over a crevasse every time he runs to the Roses' farm, and the camera lingers on the rocks at its edges, so a viewer knows exactly what will happen. Thomas falls in. That kind of setup pays off later with lingering shots of a window lock that does not quite latch, and the payoff goes differently from what you would expect.

Cage in restrained mode

The actors all acquit themselves well. Cage is restrained here, playing a concerned parent, and he is great as usual. The film could still have used a jolt of the Vampire's Kiss rage at times. Jenkins and Martell are both good, and they do a lot to establish a bond between brothers who love each other despite bickering and wanting very different things.

Frank Mobilio's cinematography and the music from Kristin Kontrol and Josh Martin support the mood. Still, there is plenty of predictable apocalypse plot to get through. Someone gets hurt. Some people are not as nice as they seem.

Cage has long been associated with wild, operatic performances, and the performance here is the opposite of Vampire's Kiss, the film in which he went to extremes. Here he plays a tired, loving father who rations his words, and the restraint suits a story about a man who has been afraid for fifteen years. A little more of the old Cage would have lifted a few scenes, but the quiet version is still worth the watch.

Arcadian at a glance

• Director: Benjamin Brewer.
• Writer: Michael Nilon.
• Cast: Nicolas Cage (Paul), Jaeden Martell (Joseph), Maxwell Jenkins (Thomas) and Sadie Soverall (Charlotte).
• Premiere: SXSW, March 11, 2024; US release April 12, 2024 from RLJE Films.
• Runtime: 92 minutes.

Is Arcadian worth watching? The verdict

Yes, for the creatures. The monster moments are terrific, and the clacking jaws and endlessly unfolding limbs are likely to stay with a viewer for quite a while. A film like this does not need an original story if its threat is original, and Arcadian proves the point. The film proves that a strong monster can lift a modest script, and that a director with a clear eye for foreshadowing can make familiar material feel fresh enough to hold a viewer's attention. The arcadian monsters are the reason to press play.

Where the film is weakest is the human drama in the last act. Familiar beats arrive on schedule, and a few characters behave according to the needs of the plot, not their own interests. It helps that the brothers are written as distinct people, with different wants and a believable closeness. Joseph's tinkering and Thomas's restlessness give the middle of the film something to chew on besides survival.

For viewers deciding how to spend ninety minutes, the pitch is easy. The film runs 92 minutes, wastes little of that and puts its best material in front of the camera. Anyone who likes post-apocalyptic stories will recognize the outline, and anyone who likes monsters will have a reason to stay. In a genre full of forgettable creatures, a film that gives viewers something to be afraid of is doing the main job.

The film has its limits. Reviews were generally favorable. Rotten Tomatoes reports 78 percent positive from 115 reviews, and Metacritic gives it 57 out of 100 from 23 critics. The Guardian called it a lean but generic thriller, The Telegraph felt Cage was underused and Empire praised the premise and the monster design. That spread matches the experience on screen: a modest film with a standout idea.

Anyone who wants a Nicolas Cage freak-out will not find it here. Anyone who wants a tight, well-shot monster movie with some real scares will.

One more reason to recommend it: the film knows how to end an image. Scenes cut at the moment of maximum dread, and the viewer is left to imagine what follows. That economy keeps the pace tight and the monsters scary, and it is a quality shared by the best creature features of any budget.

Sources

• Arcadian (film), Wikipedia — Checked against: cast, director and release year.