Streamin’ King: ‘1922’ Elevates A Minor King Story Into A Major King Film

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching 1922, Netflix’s new original film adapted from 2014’s novella collection Full Dark, No Stars. Very light on spoilers.

THE GIST: Nebraska farmer Wilfred Leland James kills his wife, Arlette, with their teenage son Henry’s collusion, when she refuses to budge on a plan that would relocate their family to the evil city of Omaha—or relocate just her and Henry, ditching the man who would/will sell his soul for his farm and legacy. Wilf and Henry suffer intensifying damnation over the course of a viciously cursed and violent final few years of life. Lots of rats and decomposed-wife hauntings.

PEDIGREE: Stars Thomas Jane (Hung, The Punisher), Molly Parker (House of Cards, Deadwood), and 18-year-old Canadian Dylan Schmid (Hulu’s Shut Eye), with appearances by Brian d’Arcy James and Neal McDonough. Written and directed by the fresh-enough-to-be-Wikipedia-less-as-of-this-writing Zak Hilditch, who in 2013 did his fifth feature pulling double duty, the apocalypse flick These Final Hours, in his native Australia. Score by Faith No More frontman Mike Patton; cinematography by Ben Richardson of the masterful Beasts of the Southern Wild, who’s done four films this year.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Unequivocally yes. 1922 is a new type of Stephen King movie, executed with as much artistic inventiveness as passionate faithfulness. (Also: not set in Maine!) As with most screen adaptations, the novella’s dense and forceful first-person confession (a Dolores Claiborne setup) loses its nuance and depth in translation, but Jane’s narration, accent, and physicality bring it to life almost as satisfyingly. He’s also a smidge more bearable to spend time with—Book Wilf’s calculated manipulation of his son (“I wore my saddest face and spoke in my saddest voice”) and his blatant racism and sexism (right from the start) are a tougher hang.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? More so than any Streamin’ King entry yet, yes. As much as It, and this one could successfully play in theaters alongside that new No. 1-earning horror movie of all time. 1922 is unnecessarily well-made, elevating a minor/briefer King work to major King film status, the way The Shawshank Redemption did so wonderfully and The Mist failed at so gruesomely.

Jane’s clench-jawed accent is about as comically thick as Brad Pitt’s in Inglourious Basterds, but he’s so deeply sunken into the role that he keeps you glued to an early-20th century story that feels true and easily accessible, a There Will Be Blood effect without the unsurpassable gifts of Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis. And his blinky moments of shock are a riot, for when you need a little laugh:

When 1922 is supposed to be beautiful, darkly or honestly, it is; when it’s meant to pull you into Wilf and Henry’s self-made hell, it does, roughly. It’s got rushed plot points (Book Wilf spends two months convincing his son to take part in the murder) and a tendency to let the camera artfully linger while the runtime grows a little too long—but not quite so long that the craft and performances don’t warrant a rewatch, or a few. From costumes to sound design to framing of shots to how the small cast works with each other on this cramped-inside/glorious-outside farm, there’s a steady, pulsing creativity. After Hilditch and Jane’s work, cinematographer Richardson and composer Patton are the MVPs, but there are plenty of trophies to go around, including one for Parker’s singular spot of rueful brightness on this dark canvas.

Violence-wise, there’s an only-semi-successful throat cutting that may or may not make you vomit, lots of rats gnashing on humans, and the most vicious, vindictive rodent-stomping ever put to film.

4 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Thomas Jane was also the top-billed star in 2003’s Dreamcatcher and 2007’s The Mist, both theatrical releases based on King works.
2. 1922 is set in the fictional hamlet of Hemingford Home, Nebraska, which is where The Stand‘s 108-year-old Mother Abigail hails from. Somewhere at the periphery of this story, Mother Abigail is already about 50 years old. In nerdtastic, metaverse-y King fashion, the town was name-checked in a couple stories in 1978’s Night Shift, which came out months before The Stand. (It’s also a brief setting in It.)
3. You can only write so many dozens of scary stories before you’ve used every creepy staple a ton of times. Stephen King’s got a preponderance of rats doing disgusting, ratty deeds in his work—including in last month’s Sleeping Beauties—but none more than in 1970’s “Graveyard Shift.” It details a crew of workers on a rat-eradicating expedition beneath their infested textile mill. It ends with a cattle-size rat queen that’s “a huge and pulsating grey, eyeless, totally without legs.” So you got off easy with 1922.
4. Full Dark, No Stars has now yielded three movies in three years, following 2014’s Lifetime movie Big Driver and A Good Marriage, which doesn’t seem to have made it beyond VOD despite being scripted by King. (Full Dark‘s only yet-to-be-adapted tale, “Fair Extension”—not at all a novella at 31 pages—might be the best of the bunch.) King’s first four-novella collection, 1982’s Different Seasons, also gave us three movies: The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, and Apt Pupil.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: A lot of B’s and B+’s so far, although many note (and some focus on) its straightforwardness and length. Indiewire says while 1922 is “nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity,” mixing “the delicate visual language of a rural Terrence Malick drama into the mold of existential horror.” The Wrap thinks it’s “overlong or maybe underfed, fleshing out the character’s mental deterioration in handsome but unsurprising detail.”

Collider saw a tie to our modern, @realDonaldTrump times by finding that it “packs a punch by inspecting the familiar terrors of masculine pride gone wrong.” The Verge appreciated its commitment to being “a simple, single self-contained horror story,” one where, “at its best, it’s a reminder that King’s biggest strengths lie in his unparalleled ability to build tension, create atmosphere, and tell a direct and brutal story.” Uproxx follows King’s claim to being “The McDonald’s of Literature” with a mixed review that concludes, “It’s nice when someone takes pride in making a cheeseburger.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR “1922” (2010): Arrived via Full Dark, No Stars, between the doorstop novels Under the Dome and 11/22/63.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: 1408, the 2007 short story adaptation starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. The hotel-set ghost story was collected in 2002’s Everything’s Eventual.

Zach Dionne is a writer based in North Carolina; he just rewatched It for $6.91 and got a free refill.. Find him on Twitter @zachdionne.

Stream 1922 on Netflix