1922 (2017)

Here is a film that commits the unfashionable act of being about something old: a man, his land, his wife, and a butcher knife. 1922 arrives with Stephen King's name attached and Thomas Jane's face caked in prairie grime, and it asks nothing of its audience except a tolerance for rat imagery and slow spiritual collapse. Wilfred James wants to keep his eighty acres. His wife wants to sell and move to Omaha. He cuts her throat, drops her in a well, and spends the next eight years being devoured from the inside. The film has no interest in instructing us. It simply watches.

The performances are sturdy. Jane, working in a register somewhere between confession and rot, carries the weight of a man who has confused property with identity. Molly Parker's Arlette is dispatched early and returns as a vision, which spares the film the trouble of giving her a life beyond the one she threatens. The son, played by Dylan Schmid, is a boy ruined by complicity, and the film lets that ruin happen without commentary. What we get instead of messaging is weather, corn, rats, and the sound of a well filling up.

Some will find the restraint admirable. Others will find it airless. The film is grim in the way that period horror often is, using 1922 as a texture instead of a thesis, and never once stopping to explain itself to a modern audience. There is no lesson here, no diagnosis of the culture, no invitation to feel virtuous for having watched. Just a farmer, a ghost, and a rodent problem that will not resolve. It is a modest achievement, and an increasingly rare one. The credits roll. The rats stay.