Summary & Recap
Wilfred “Wilf” James, a farmer, and his wife Arlette James, together with their 14-year-old son Henry, reside in Hemingford, Nebraska in 1922. Arlette wants to sell the farm and move to Omaha, but Wilf is against it. He makes the decision to persuade Henry to assist in Arlette’s murder while putting Shannon Cotterie, Henry’s girlfriend, in jeopardy. Arlette is against their relationship. Henry grudgingly consents to help his father execute the murder.
To please Arlette, Wilf appears to approve of the deal. She drinks too much while she celebrates. Henry hides her face while Wilf slashes her throat with a butcher’s knife after Wilf takes her into bed in a drunken haze. Wilf is forced to toss Arlette into a dry well, where her corpse is quickly eaten by rats, despite Wilf’s intentions to bury her body with Henry’s assistance. Henry passes out while carrying Arlette. The following day, in an attempt to conceal Arlette’s body and give an excuse for plugging the well, they throw a cow down it. After her abrupt absence, Sheriff Jones becomes suspicious. He examines the house but finds no evidence of a crime, so he hesitantly accepts Wilf’s account that his wife fled.
Henry regrets the crime he and his father did and grows more melancholy and reclusive over time. Shannon starts to worry more and more, and then finds out she is expecting Henry’s child. Her parents choose to place her in an Omaha Catholic facility until the baby is delivered, at which point the child will be placed for adoption. After reaching Omaha, Henry steals Wilf’s automobile and flees with Shannon.
Wilf seems to be going crazy as the winter wears on because rats are bothering him all the time. In an attempt to restore his home, he takes out a mortgage, but he is never allowed to start because a rat bites his hand when he is going through an upstairs closet. The roofs of his house and barn collapse due to ongoing negligence, but he is too drunk and plagued with guilt to fix them, and as he becomes more and more isolated, his hand injury gets worse. His home completely collapses under the weight of rats and descends into complete decay.
In a pivotal moment, Wilf is faced with his wife’s spirit while the rats that devoured her body surround him. In the basement, she corners him and speaks to him in a menacing whisper. She describes Henry and Shannon’s fate as it is seen by the audience. As robbers, they took on the name “Sweetheart Bandits”. Shannon was shot during one of their robberies, miscarries the child, and eventually passes away from severe blood loss in an abandoned house they discovered by the side of the road. Henry takes a pistol to his head and hangs himself next to her.
Later, the sheriff informs Wilf while he is in the hospital following the amputation of his hand due to an infection that the body of an unknown woman has been discovered by the side of the road; the sheriff believes this woman to be Arlette. Wilf receives Henry’s body, which has been nibbled through by rats just like his mother’s. Wilf is the sole attendee at Henry’s funeral. Once more, he witnesses his wife’s ghost encircled by rats. When Wilf tries to sell Shannon’s father his land, he is met with a firm warning to leave and never return. Wilf comes to Omaha and gets a job hauling pallets after selling the land to the livestock firm for a low price, but he is unable to avoid being followed by rats.
In 1930, after eight years, Wilf writes his confession and ends with the words, “In the end, we all get caught.” By the time he’s done, his room is overrun with rats. Wilf has seen the bodies of Arlette, Henry, and Shannon. Wilf will die soon, Henry threatens, brandishing the same butcher’s knife that killed his mother.
1922 Movie | Physicological Key takeaways
Wilfred was intelligent and manipulative but he lacked a strategic and long-term vision of what he may win or loss due to his decisions. His strategy favoured short term gains but at the end he lost everything including himself.
Wifred use various phychological tactics to achieve his plan including emotional blackmail with Henry, when he convinced him that his mother plans will put him away from his lover, and feigning peace when he pretended that he agreed his wife plans in order to deceive her and make her fall into his trap eventually mudering her.
1992 Movie | Key Characters
- Henry James: He was raised assisting his parents, Annette and Wilfred James, in tending to their farm. He helps his father kill his mother as she threatens to separate them from Shannon Cotterie, his love interest. Afterwards, he betrays his father and flees with Shannon to live a life of crime; they are dubbed the “Sweetheart Bandits”.
- Wilfred James: The primary antagonistic character in Stephen King’s horror novella 1922 and the corresponding 2017 movie is Wilfred James. As a result of killing his wife for her land, the avaricious farmer loses everything in the end. Wilf is avaricious, cunning, impetuous, and somewhat smart; he even manages to dupe the sheriff into accepting his version of Arlette’s disappearance. He uses deception to get his kid to assist him in the murder. Wilf does, however, have a very amiable demeanor toward all of his other associates, including the Cotterie family, Lars Olsen, and the banker from Hemingford Trust.
Watch 1922 Movie Online
You can watch the movie online with English subtitles on Netflix.
1922 Movie Trailer
