There are two wolves in all of us. This applies to everyone except Nicolas Cage. Within Nicolas Cage there are two Nicolas Cages: the brooding, retrograde Nic Cage of Pig And Leaving Las Vegasand the screaming, manic Nic Cage of A vampire’s kiss, The wicker manAnd Mother and father. Which one wins? The one he decides suits a particular role, sometimes regardless of the film around him. (I’ll always wonder why the calm, internal, deadpan Nicolas Cage showed up for the otherwise crazy, supernatural action movie Drive angry.)
In Benjamin Brewer’s small-scale alien apocalypse film Arcadian, the quiet adult Nic Cage reappears for a film that could have used a bit more deviant energy. But for once, the central issue of the film is not that of Nic Cage, but that of Nic Cage how many he has to sit down. “Nicolas Cage Tries to Raise Teenagers at the End of the World” has potential as a premise, even if it doesn’t sound radically innovative. Arcadian Too often, however, Cage casts Cage aside and finds nothing as compelling or energetic to replace him.
Image: IFC Films
As the film opens, Cage’s character, Paul, flees a city that is falling apart as unseen forces attack. The crisis is mainly suggested with sound signals and striking images of deserted streets and a smoking skyline. The approach suggests a project in the order of magnitude Horizon – a low-budget but high-concept disaster film with an ambitious visual design that elevates it beyond its small-scale origins. But immediately afterwards, Paul retreats to the countryside, where he finds baby twins on a small mattress in a clutter-filled room. The sequence is so short that it feels like Brewer and screenwriter Michael Nilon are deliberately glossing over the details for a later big reveal that never comes.
It is not clear where Paul is when he finds the babies, how he determines that their guardians are gone, or whether he has a relationship with any of the children or the place where he finds them. It’s easiest to guess that he came across both by accident, and that the babies were hidden by parents who subsequently died in the attack. But the film is shot and edited in such a confusing way that you could just as easily assume that Paul stumbled upon a farm and murdered the owners to take their land, then discovered to his chagrin that they had children. Or returning to his childhood home and being shocked to hear someone was storing babies on his property. It is the first time Arcadian conveniently skips over the important world-building and character-building context, but it’s far from the last. (Remarkably, we never learn anything about Paul—who he was or where he came from.)
Fifteen years after the opening scene, Paul lives a life on a farm with the now half-grown boys Joseph (Jaeden Martell, from the It movies and Knives out) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins, from Netflix Lost in space). Paul is a stern but frustratingly distant father figure who seems to be reaching the limits of his authority for the first time, while Thomas neglects his chores to run to a neighboring farm, where he pursues a tentative flirtation with local farm girl Charlotte.Salt burn‘s Sadie Soverall). Joseph, meanwhile, has become a tinkerer, with dreams of fighting the invaders with handcrafted technology – a dream urgently realized when the enemy makes an aggressive attempt to take down the farm.
Image: IFC Films
A lot of Arcadian plays out like a mashup of the excellent Bill Paxton thriller Brittleness and the more recent ones A quiet place, with the caveat that the mysterious invaders aren’t offended by noise – they just seem offended by humanity in general. One brief line of dialogue puts forward a theory that the attackers were sent to clean up Earth’s environment by radically reducing the human population, but it’s clear that this is just a gamble by survivors searching for meaning in their situation – one of the Arcadian‘s better, subtler nod to how people deal with helplessness and trauma. The attackers are, for the most part, alien and chillingly unknowable.
They’re also the strongest asset for a film that falls back on established tropes and continues to gloss over opportunities to make the story distinctive. As Thomas’s rebellion becomes more and more dangerous, both for him and his small family, it seems like the potential for enormous interpersonal tension. Paul and Joseph both respond by withdrawing from the conflict and leaving large chunks behind Arcadian strangely limp. The film features a remarkably beautiful scene between Charlotte and Thomas, where they figure out how to flirt in a world where they have no media input or role models to emulate. But Thomas’ relationship with the other two protagonists is never shown. And without enough human drama to sustain it, Arcadian must instead fall back on human-inhuman conflict.
Image: IFC Films
There are a number of standout moments in that battle: One mesmerizing, almost silent extended take is guaranteed to have the audience in the theaters outright screaming. Too much of it Arcadian‘s monster stalking and home invasion action is known from similar recent feature films with creatures, from A quiet place and its sequel Birdhouse and its sequel Unpleasant No one will save you. But the creature’s design is unnerving, alarming and unpredictable. Viewers who don’t remember anything else about this film a week after seeing it will surely remember the eerie way the antagonists travel, or how they signal they’re ready to attack. Their appearance alone makes the film worth a horror lover’s time.
But once the action really gets going, Cage is largely absent, and muddy spatial relationships and confusing, hard-to-watch action take away a significant percentage of the power from what should be an explosive final act. And once the film settles into a fairly standard chase-and-fight movie, the lack of greater character depth or nuance, or more compelling relationships between the leads, limits what the filmmakers can do to make this story stand out from all the previous projects. it echoes. Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror film, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to the vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and most importantly, more Nicolas Cage – both versions of him.
Arcadian premieres in theaters on April 12.