Arcadian

Grade: B

I’d had no idea what an Arcadian was, or meant. I figured that either my dictionary app wouldn’t give me any results, because the word didn’t exist, or it would say something like “a f***ed-up looking creature that comes out at night to attack and kill people in a Nicolas Cage movie.” My guess was a little off. It means “rural, rustic, or pastoral, especially suggesting simple, innocent contentment.” The characters are living the Arcadian lifestyle.

It opens with Paul (Nicolas Cage) making his way through a post-apocalyptic land, where something started happening pretty recently, by the looks of it. He rescues two abandoned babies, and takes them with him. We jump forward 15 years, where he is living in a countryside house with his adopted sons, now teenagers. The creatures they deal with on a nightly basis seem right out of M. Night Shyamalan world – not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t know what triggers them, how they got there, or what they want, but the three men in the house have the nightly routine down, with the locking and the barricading and the traps that are set should one make it in.

Cage is a producer in this movie, and is billed as the star, but he’s not in it as much as you may think. We don’t see much of him in the second half; it becomes more about the teenage boys’ journey. Cage is a loving father figure to them, frequently interjecting with a “that’s not helping” whenever the brothers get into a squabble. The boys, nicely played by Jaeden Martell (It, Knives Out) and Maxwell Jenkins (Young Reacher in Reacher), are very resourceful. One of them builds a go kart/car/automobile of sorts. There’s a nice puppy love subplot involving the daughter in a nearby house (Sadie Soverall from Saltburn). It is cute, and manages to never quite veer into a formulaic love interest.

I liked a scene where a monster is in the process of breaking in, and all we see is a hand, with a finger that keeps extending and keeps extending until it’s dangerously close to touching a sleeping person’s face. As is often the case, when we do finally get a good look at the creatures, they’re not as scary as we’ve built them up to be in our heads. In Arcadian’s short hour and a half runtime, it was a pleasure to meet these characters, see some pretty locations, and have a little adventure with them. Critics have dinged the movie for being derivative of well-known ones that have come before, particularly the Alien and A Quiet Place series. I haven’t seen anything from those, so Arcadian was mostly fresh for me.

Grade: B