2025
Sheriff Alan Pangborn has seen some shit. I’m quite certain he’s been in several Stephen King stories, though off the top of my head I can only come up with The Dark Half. Anyway, we don’t care about Pangborn. Or anyone else in the town, really. We only have eyes for Nettie Cobb. And her precious crown of braids and her folkloric cardigan and her weird Hummel obsession.
I read Needful Things when I was 14 or 15 years old. I remember almost nothing about it, except for the general premise: mysterious shopkeeper Leeland Gaunt (Max von Sydow, who during his career played Jesus, a priest, AND the devil!) opens a store where everyone can buy the thing they most desire for pocket change and a “favor.” The favors escalate. People turn on each other. The town tears itself apart. Classic King!
What I do remember vividly is Nettie Cobb. Shy, damaged Nettie, who works at a diner and lives alone with her dog Raider. Nettie, who has been through something terrible (the book goes into detail about her abusive past; the movie just suggests it). Nettie, who just wants to be left alone with her little Hummel figurines. Nettie, who has one enemy in the world: turkey farmer Wilma Jerzyck, who hates her for reasons that feel both petty and primal.
Amanda Plummer plays Nettie in the 1993 film adaptation, and she is absolutely perfect. Plummer seems to understand how to play damaged, fragile characters without ever making them pathetic. She doesn’t ask for your pity. She makes you understand Nettie from the inside out, the way she makes herself small, the way she flinches, the way her voice goes soft and uncertain. But there’s also a sharp brittleness underneath. A sense that if you pushed her too far, something would break, and what emerged wouldn’t be gentle or small at all.
Gaunt sells Nettie a Hummel figurine, a little porcelain shepherd boy that she’s wanted for years. The price is almost nothing and whatever small favor he’ll ask later.
But Nettie isn’t the one who pranks Wilma. That’s a kid named Brian Rusk, who smears mud and goose poop on Wilma’s clean sheets hanging on the line. Brian did it as his favor to Gaunt, payment for a Mickey Mantle baseball card. But Wilma doesn’t know that. She blames Nettie.
Meanwhile, someone else (town drunk Hugh Priest, doing his own favor for Gaunt) kills Raider, Nettie’s dog. The only other living thing she loves in the world. But Nettie doesn’t know it was Hugh. She thinks it was Wilma.
The fight between Nettie and Wilma is maybe one of the most brutal scenes in any Stephen King adaptation I’ve seen. It’s ugly and desperate and vicious. They go at each other with a knife and a meat cleaver in Wilma’s kitchen, and the film plays “Ave Maria” over the carnage, which makes it feel both operatic and deeply insane. This beautiful, sacred music swells in the background while two women are absolutely hacking away at each other.
Plummer plays it with wild, feral energy. All that brittleness shattering spectacularly, and what’s underneath isn’t rage exactly…it’s grief and terror and something that’s been coiled up inside her for so long that when it finally breaks free, it’s unstoppable. The fight ends with both of them crashing through a window, still stabbing at each other as they fall.
It’s the emotional vortex of the whole movie. Everything else, Max Von Sydow’s Leland Gaunt being charming and demonic, Ed Harris trying to hold the town together (before Pangborn goes on to guide the town through another crisis, presumably), J.T. Walsh spiraling into paranoid violence, it all feels like setup for this one moment. Nettie and Wilma destroying each other over wrongs neither of them actually committed, manipulated by forces they don’t even understand.
I had no interest in watching this until someone on YouTube last year called it essential autumn viewing. I’m still not sure what makes it specifically seasonal; the leaves are always blowing down the streets, there’s that farmhouse atmosphere, everyone’s wearing coats and sweater, but then again, so many King adaptations seem to exist in perpetual October anyway, don’t they?
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