My Thoughts on The Arborist
The Arborist is yet another horror film with grief as its central theme, which is becoming the norm these days, and while I do like those type of horror films, it takes a lot for them to work and bring something fresh to the table.
The film opens on a quiet note, almost mundane, but the undercurrent of tragedy is immediate, where Ellie, played by Lucy Walters, and her son Wyatt, played by Hudson West, have endured a terrible family loss, and the film doesn’t waste time lingering on exposition.
Instead, it throws them into this new environment, a sprawling estate with trees that seem almost defiant in their health, and asks us to follow along.
I liked the first act, as there’s a rhythm to it that works - the estate, with its seemingly endless gardens and dark corners, sets up a kind of quiet tension - and I thought Walters did a good job balancing that subtle maternal protectiveness with the creeping unease of the situation.
Wyatt is more than a passive observer though - his reactions feel slightly off-kilter - and there’s an almost clinical precision in how the film establishes the characters’ vulnerability, letting the little gestures lead the way.
But, the film starts to stumble somewhere in the middle, and while it’s not that the second half is bad, exactly, it’s more that it seems unsure of itself, as the initial story - the family’s grief - runs alongside the estate’s own hidden tragedy, and then the film hints at yet another narrative layer that never quite settles.
You end up trying to track three threads at once, and it doesn't really work, as while there’s an ambition there that I admire, but it also feels like the movie was carrying too much weight, where the pacing becomes uneven, with moments that should be tense stretched out, and moments that should feel like release cut a bit too short.
The supernatural elements in The Arborist are fine though, and the haunting presence that starts to take an interest in Wyatt is subtle but persistent, a kind of quiet menace that makes you uncomfortable without hitting you over the head.
I think what I found most effective was how it interacted with the family dynamic - it’s one thing to have a ghost or a spirit on screen, but it’s another to have it highlight the cracks in a relationship - the silent anxieties, the half-spoken fears.
That part worked well enough.
The performances are fine too, where Lucy Walters is steady in her portrayal of Ellie, while. Hudson West as Wyatt brings a restrained energy that is a bit unnerving in the right way, while Will Lyman as Arthur Randolph, the estate owner, walks a line between enigmatic and banal, even if his motivations weren’t always fully clear.
At 100 minutes or so, the movie isn’t long by modern standards, but it feels long relative to the story it wants to tell, and that's never a good thing, where there are stretches where the film asks you to sit through scenes that don't necessarily add anything new.
There’s an attempt at visual poetry in these moments, but it often lands as filler, and I think trimming a few of these sequences could have sharpened the film’s focus and made the haunting feel more immediate.
As for the grief element, the film has the estate connect back to the family’s own grief, and there’s a symmetry there that’s quietly effective, but the problem arises when the film tries to add a third thread to tie the first two together as mentioned.
It distracts from the core tension between Ellie, Wyatt, and the estate, and ends up diluting the impact of both the personal and the supernatural arcs, which just makes the script uneven where some lines land with quiet power, while others feel almost perfunctory.
We do get some real tenderness and awkwardness between Ellie and Wyatt though, but the exposition-heavy scenes with Arthur sometimes drag, and there’s a sense that the movie is trying to explain itself too much, which is ironic because the film’s strength lies in what it leaves unsaid.
I think The Arborist is a movie that both succeeds and struggles in ways that are oddly linked, but it’s the kind of film that sparks thought, even if it doesn’t fully satisfy on a structural level.