SXSW 2024 Review: ARCADIAN, Rich Relationships And Terrifying Monsters Make This A Winner

The old world is dead and the new one wants to kill us in Benjamin Brewer’s solo feature directing debut, Arcadian. A post-apocalyptic survival horror with strong character work and some incredible monsters, Arcadian packs an emotional punch rarely seen in a creature feature like this.

Paul (Nicolas Cage) lives with his sons Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) in a decaying farmhouse in rural Ireland. It’s some time after an apocalyptic event that wiped out the majority of the human race, leaving the survivors to fend for themselves with no structure in place to keep them safe. Once the sun goes down, the beasts come out, and they have only one goal: destruction. When Thomas sneaks off to see his crush, Charlotte (Sadie Soverall) at a neighboring farm and ends up stuck out in the dark, his father strikes out to rescue him, though nothing ever goes quite the smoothly and it’s the kids who end up taking on the night for better or for worse.

A film about isolation and the dangers that exist where we cannot see them is par for the course in this “post” Covid cinema landscape. Thankfully, Arcadian doesn’t dwell on the pandemic of it all, rather using it as fuel for solid storytelling and a barn-burning of a creature feature. Written by longtime Cage associate Michael Nilon, who receives his first screenwriting credit here, Arcadian is a genuinely engaging story with terrifying monsters, and not the other way around.

For the first two acts of the film, we spend time getting to know the family. We understand Paul’s fears, Thomas’s wanderlust, and Joseph’s desire to be treated like an adult in a world where his adolescence has been both accelerated and halted. The boys are forced to grow in order to take care of the farm, but by necessity they aren’t allowed to leave, cementing a child-parent dynamic that should have begun to evolve by their teenage years, which is where we find them. The conflicts may be different in their specifics, but the drive for autonomy with the boys is innate, and that puts them at odds with a father who is none too eager for them to leave the nest.

While these relationships are being established, there are the monsters. Almost entirely evident only by the vicious sounds they make as they attempt to breach the farmhouse doors, these things are terrifying from the start, even as unseen entities. There is the risk that the visuals will not live up to the hype created by their noisy attacks, but when they explode into the film, those fears are assuaged as these monsters – let’s call them Chompers – are like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Cleverly, Brewer and Nilon make sure that we are all experiencing the Chompers at the same time that the characters are, since Thomas and Joseph have lived an entire lifetime in hiding. When an attack befalls Charlotte’s family farm while Thomas is there, mayhem ensures, and the combination of these hulking creatures and the absolutely pants-shitting sounds they make when they attack is enough to send any horror fan reeling.

Though it is Cage’s name on the marquee, Arcadian is really the kids’ show. Each of them displays a particular talent that ends up being crucial to surviving the eventual onslaught, and the script wisely prepares us for their hero turns in a way that is subtle enough that it barely registers. Some of the early characterization can feel a tiny bit laborious when you know there there’s an explosion of action just around the corner, but I liked spending time with these kids, their experiences felt real and lived in.

That’s the magic of Arcadian, by the time the shit hits the fan, we know and care for these characters and equally important, we understand that they care for each other. While it may not display quite the same level of scares as The Descent, Arcadian definitely takes a page from that film’s care and character building. Brewer’s confident direction, the vast unbroken Irish desolation, and an effective score all support the action on screen which is, for my money, some of the best monster action in years. Seeing this in a dark theater with booming sound was an incredible bonding experience, so let’s hope that Shudder finds a way to get it on the big screen before it lands on the service later in the year.