Rating: R | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: April 12th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: RLJE Films
Director(s): Benjamin Brewer
Writer(s): Mike Nilon

And they’re here to cleanse the planet of the virus of the human race.

For fifteen years, Paul (Nicolas Cage) has kept his sons safe. Unlike most parents, however, that job isn’t merely protecting them eating poison or running into traffic. No, Paul has raised his boys in a post-apocalyptic world wherein survival demands barricading oneself in for the night to avoid run-ins with violent creatures that hunt from dusk til dawn. Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) are now at an age where they can help their father secure the farmhouse they now call home … and unleash a rebellious independent streak that just might risk all of their lives.

Screenwriter Michael Nilon and director Benjamin Brewer have a decent premise with Arcadian. Yes, it’s pretty much a less successful A Quiet Place rip-off that sacrifices our investment in the characters for our enjoyment of action set-pieces, but there’s still enough to grab onto so the ride doesn’t feel like a total superficial waste. After all, it’s tough to toe that line and even tougher to do it correctly with less than ninety-minutes of runway. Rather than spend time with Paul’s family, we’re meant to turn a prologue with him running to protect his twin babies beneath an underpass as all the love necessary for their present selves.

While it’s enough to earn Paul’s call to action when Thomas doesn’t come home, the way his heroics play out is less about love than duty. He must protect them even if it means risking his own life. He’ll run out into the night and fend off as many beasts as he can to find his son and bring him back alive. We believe it because Paul is a stock character whose personality is “Dad.” Cage does his best to make it more, but he’s mostly just going through the determined motions of a man whose life is expendable when compared to his kids. It leads to some badass moments, but very little emotion.

You could pretty much say that about the entire film. All the interesting bits (Joseph’s analytical brain creating traps to study the monsters teases some cool potential only to be usurped by a generic sibling squabble) serve the overall conceit—itself so by-the-numbers and direct that it almost buckles in on itself before it can even attempt to hold up any weight. Because Arcadian is all set-up. It’s an introduction to a world explained away by a children’s game “guessing” how the end of the world occurred, hoping we’ll stop wondering about the truth if we’re under the impression that the “truth” neither matters nor exists.

In that regard, the film works. Martell, Jenkins, and Sadie Soverall (who plays Charlotte, Thomas’s crush who lives with her parents in a community that doesn’t trust Paul) carry the drama well as teens growing up fast and needing to implement everything their parents taught them on-the-fly to survive. And the monsters are effective if also super weird (gorilla-like in movement with a sock puppet head that claps obnoxiously fast at its jaw hinge before attacking with a goo sack that dissolves and absorbs its prey???). Their volatility match by humor when they latch together into a giant wheel rolling down the road.

By the end, I found myself more excited about what’s next than what I just witnessed—the opposite of A Quiet Place. That one sets up a world through the eyes of a family while this sets up a family trapped inside a world. And while Nilon and Brewer think they’ve also done the former to make us care about Paul and company’s survival, I just saw that trio as ancillary to the unknown. They want us to enjoy the effects, action, and gore so much that they forgot to make the people engaged in those things more than two-dimensional stereotypes of a demanding father, good son (industrious), and bad son (romantic). An accident sparks a conflict, all hell breaks loose, the dust settles, and we go home.

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Maxwell Jenkins, Nicolas Cage, and Jaeden Martell in Benjamin Brewer’s ARCADIAN; courtesy of RLJE Films and Shudder.