Jason Clarke wears an unidentified watch

Sometimes dead is better. Stephen King wrote that line in 1983, and it's the whole moral of Pet Sematary, the one Louis Creed ignores because grief makes people stupid. Jason Clarke plays the doctor in the 2019 remake, directed by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch, who move the Creed family from Boston to rural Maine where their new house backs up against woods that contain something old and wrong. John Lithgow takes over the Jud Crandall role from Fred Gwynne in the 1989 original, and he plays the neighbor's warning with a weariness that suggests he's been carrying this secret too long.

The 2019 version makes one major change from King's novel: it kills Ellie instead of Gage. The switch gives the film a resurrected child who can talk, reason, and manipulate, which is arguably more disturbing than a feral toddler. Clarke plays Louis as a rational man who knows exactly what he's doing when he carries his daughter's body to the burial ground, and that self-awareness makes it worse. His watch hasn't been identified.