Content warning: This article mentions familial abuse.
After a tumultuous 18-month-long wait buoyed by COVID-19 restrictions and setbacks, Scott Cooper's “Antlers” (2021) has at long last premiered. Though the film features some pretty cool imagery, gore and creature design, it is, at its core, a movie that simply doesn’t know what story it wants to tell nor how it wants to tell it. While juggling half-baked themes of abuse and neglect, poverty, addiction, environmentalism, dot dot dot and playing into the unfortunate horror trope of using Indigenous mythologies in a film that is not centered around Indigenous people or stories, the movie feels unfinished, like each aspect is a sentence trailing off into destination-less ellipses. There’s very little connection, whether it be between plot points, characters or thematic intentions. Indecisive on whether to focus on hard hitting themes or haunting visuals, the film falls into themodern horror pitfall of creating overly serious yet hollow metaphors of their monsters. Throughout, the movie often went down the ‘show don’t tell’ route without actually showing or explaining anything. Overall, it is a mess of a story and is almost but not quite saved by its visuals and creature design.
“Antlers,” which takes place in small-town rural Oregon, follows Julia (Keri Russell), an elementary school teacher who’s just moved back to her hometown to live with her police chief brother Paul (Jesse Plemons) in the house they grew up in with their abusive father. It also follows Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), a young boy in Julia’s class whose father and brother have secretly been infected with a mysterious and insidious illness after being attacked by an antlered creature. As people begin to go missing and bodies are found mutilated in the town at large, Julia begins to notice some worrying signs about Lucas’ behavior and appearance. She suspects abuse, having been through her own trauma in the past. As the town, with Paul taking the lead, tries to figure out what is wreaking destruction, Julia tries to delve into Lucas’ life to help in any way she can, and as time runs out, the two storylines bleed together.
The biggest thematic and symbolic focus of the film, and its worst transgression, is the portrayal of child abuse as it applies to both Julia and Paul and to Lucas and his brother. It comes off as very, very awkward — trying to fit together a monster seeped in folklore (whose origins are delivered in a tight, one-time info dump so that the audience gets its Wendigo 101 lesson) with the traumatic reality of familial abuse. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t seem fair. With a flesh-and-blood monster so tied to the abuse, one would think that defeating the monster would be therapeutic or triumphant, or even surface-level satisfying. However, the monster’s existence is tied to the loss of real and specific human life, and defeating it only deepens that first loss with no allowance for relief. Abuse goes untethered, floating above the movie in the outskirts. The way that abuse is portrayed for different siblings in the same household is an interesting angle, yet this too goes underdeveloped. The idea that siblings have different experiences within the same situation is important, but the idea of saving each other is turned on its head and thrown out the window. While the plot follows some vaguely cliched horror roadmaps, the themes never lead to where you expect them to and end up being undermined by plot choices.
The saving graces of this movie are the striking visuals. Crisp and muddy nature is the backdrop for the movie, and through deep greens and dark fogs, this movie is able to hide its own emptiness behind beautifully haunting mirages. Toward the end of the film, a trend of flashing police lights and car headlights cut through fog in wound-like deliberation, and the effect is amazing. Furthermore, the gore and creature design is amazing. The different stages of ill characters and different portrayals of the monstrous wendigo are all disturbing, blood-soaked and black-veined. Cooper has a talent for solidifying the settings and atmosphere of the film.
Overall, the movie, even if not outright offensive, was disappointing. Call it a victim of high expectations compounded by a delayed release, but the movie came off as unfinished — a lazy script wrapped in beautiful images and design. The film had some good scares, well-executed gore and truly amazing looking creatures, as well as solidly fine performances from truly talented actors, but to what end?
