Turn on a horror movie named The Arborist and you may expect a slasher about a killer tree surgeon.
Maybe an arborist, driven to madness from years of fighting a losing battle to protect the health and safety of trees, turns to violence against those whose callousness has led to the destruction of the horticulture he or she has dedicated their life to preserve. Well before the 100-minute runtime of The Arborist lapses, however, viewers will realize that the horror movie they are watching has little, if anything, to do with a crazed tree surgeon and is far better characterized as a competently made, albeit flat, examination of intergenerational guilt.
From writer/director Andrew Mudge, The Arborist takes place one year after the infant baby of Ellie (Lucy Walters) suddenly died in the middle of the night. Together with her adolescent son Wyatt (Hudson West), the grief-stricken mother is hired by mysterious recluse Arthur Randolph (Will Lyman) to begin felling trees on his sprawling estate. It doesn’t take long after being hired until Wyatt starts exhibiting erratic behavior and experiencing unsettling hallucinations that tap into his family’s tragic past and reveal the real reason Arthur hired them.
The film wastes no time enveloping its audience in unnerving imagery and concepts. A duo of prologue scenes feature a strange orb of branches, a quick glance at a frightening raven figure, and an on-screen depiction of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). It’s enough to rattle even the more hardened of horror fans and seemingly sets the stage for a more cerebral series of frights to come.
Mudge’s film largely struggles to capitalize on this strong start, however. Much of the proceeding film plods along in repetitive, monotonous fashion, injecting a tame scare every 10-15 minutes between drawn-out sequences of a mother and adolescent son bickering. The setting is certainly picturesque, while the contained wooded location and limited cast of characters add a sense of cozy tension to the mix.
Meanwhile, Will Lyman’s remarkable screen presence and Alan Rickman-esque voice definitely shroud the film in much-needed uneasiness. But atmosphere alone can’t carry a film burdened by such laborious pacing and little narrative movement in its first half.
Eventually though, The Arborist finds a point of intrigue by further exploring the dark history of the estate and its prior occupants. Many similar horror films nowadays opt against too much exposition, choosing to abstractly leave much up for interpretation rather than detail what exactly is going on with its supernatural occurrences.
Mudge refreshingly departs from this trend by delving into an interesting backstory for Lyman’s reclusive homeowner, which eventually connects to the recent trauma experienced by Walters and West’s mother-son duo. The filmmaker doesn’t spell everything out to his audience, as a conversation or two with a fellow viewer after the credits roll will probably be necessary to sufficiently put all the pieces of the puzzle (and metaphor) together. But, once the film can be distilled into a coherent tale, a somewhat compelling examination of the guilt we feel after a loss and the guilt we pass down to subsequent generations awaits.
It’s disappointing that such an examination of guilt is couched in an otherwise flat movie. Aside from the aforementioned prologue and a couple of subsequent glimpses at a disturbing raven/man hybrid, the film offers little in the way of scares, whether it be overt thrills or more subtle, thought-provoking terrors.
The family drama at the story’s core similarly falls short in failing to expound beyond a mother and her adolescent son trading verbal blows as a way of coping with the trauma of losing a family member. The performances from Walters and West effectively convey the intended psychological torment that their two characters are enduring, although they are hindered by a screenplay disinterested in adding anything nuanced or novel to yet another on-screen depiction of a troubled teen and his distraught mother. Admittedly, the message involving grief and guilt that the film converges on proves fascinating, but largely uninteresting characters and even less interesting character interactions deprive the film of some of its emotional weight.
Genre fans who find themselves gravitating to films like The Babadook, Hereditary, and The Night House that examine suppressed grief and suffocating guilt may get some mileage out of The Arborist, as Mudge’s film similarly uses the aesthetic language of a horror movie to offer messaging on difficult subject matter. Unfortunately, however, the film doesn’t resonate emotionally nor provoke psychological terror in the manner these and many other similar projects have, despite it leaning into a decent mystery and suspenseful atmosphere in its second half.
Maybe a trashy slasher about an insane tree surgeon would have left a more lasting impression.
The film is available on various digital platforms as of Friday, February 6, via Dark Sky Films. Visit their official site for more information.