1922 (2024)

1922

Truly, this year has been the Stephen King’s Year with the last of his many films and TV adaptations being somehow surprising. Someone would expect a remake of “It” if not for its unexpected colossal sales at the box office. “The Dark Tower” was in some state of pre-production for years, which brought about Mike Flanagan turning his vision of “Gerald’s Game” into a Netflix screen.

On TV, after “The Walking Dead”, one could easily think that “The Mist” should come next (but it was god awful) or that “Mr. Mercedes”, having been a NYT bestseller, was bound to become an adapted film on television as well. So here we are at 1922 a 131 page novella from Stephen King Full Dark No Stars anthology published in 2010: he did alright, but there’s nothing here that screams feature film and director Zak Hilditch’s adaptation suffers as a result.

With weathered skin from working on the land and an amazing southern accent, Thomas Jane plays Wilfred James who is a Nebraska farmer with a bitter wife called Arlette (Molly Parker) and dutiful son named Henry (Dylan Schmid). Not quite comfortable with rural life, Arlette wants to sell her half to the local livestock company; however when these plans are mentioned by his wife, you see fear building up all over him till he can’t stand it anymore by mentioning moving out of town That’s dumb people stuff; The James family isn’t such.

Wilf commits his first despicable act when he weaponizes his son’s first love. Henry is already in love with Shannon Cotterie(Kaitlyn Bernard) who is their neighbor girl hence moving them to city will bring separation between these young lovers. In such situation arise the reasons captured so unconvincingly why Wilfred chooses killing Arlette as only option for solving this problem, including the help of his son.

“1922” tells most of its story in flashbacks through a visibly troubled Wilfred now at a hotel room like the protagonist of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell tale Heart tormented by demons he created himself. This means that there is an unreliable narrator telling this story though not much is done with that cinematically. No, instead we get a mostly straight line from violence to insanity as depicted in “1922”, not unusual subject matter for King who has long been writing about how men sometimes opt for murder over logic.

There are times when a movie moves slowly and then there are those that just slay, and “1922” is one of the latter instances a couple too many. The truth of the matter is that it’s a pretty tough job to make a film about someone who might be going bonkers since you have to somehow show what may be nothing more than figments of remorseful man’s imagination.

Thomas Jane does his best to live up to the material and director; as an actor he should have done all he could for this. In his early scenes it seemed like his slow delivery was overused though the character work is strong here especially when Wilf starts descending into madness. This is however not enough, because outside of Jane little else catches one’s interest further proving why confessional novella may not always translate well onto film. The film lacks visual acuity, the lines do not remain memorable ever and besides in essence the movie turns out to be no more than your typical horror classic: don’t murder.

Almost everything happening in the final 30 minutes of “1922” redeems my faith in humanity, but I could not help but think about how much tighter and thrilling this story could have been if it had been cut down by half its number pages into an hour-long anthology horror series Instead, we get another case where a really good short story ends up becoming bad feature-length film, which will easily go forgotten since it has probably landed at last on 2017 The Year Of King project nobody can remember except maybe for that “The Mist” nonsense.

Watch 1922 For Free On Gomovies.