Antlers (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

What a fascinating movie. It's been over a year and a half since its original release date, but finally Antlers is here. Featuring one of the most surprising team-ups I've yet seen, this movie is the result of collaboration between director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, Hostiles) and producer Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water). Cooper's films usually take place in rural areas and deal with exceptionally sad people; del Toro's films usually combine reality with fantasy in macabre or grotesque ways. Together, here, they craft a gloomy story set in rural Oregon about the darkest sides of human nature, transporting us to lives lived in isolation and not-having. It's a wickedly beautiful movie to behold, and while its themes aren't as well articulated or even explored as some might like, I've found myself unable to think of much else since viewing it.

Adapted (along with Cooper) by writer Nick Antosca (NBC's Hannibal, Syfy's Channel Zero, and Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor) from his own short story, Antlers concerns a homecoming for an outcast and an out-coming of family secrets and trauma. Julia (Keri Russell) has returned, apparently recently, to her gloomy hometown, which clearly has fallen into disrepair after economic setbacks and is now riddled with drugs. Setting herself up as a teacher, she tries to reconnect with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), the stoic sheriff who seems keenly aware that his town is dying. Through their furtive dialogue and a few well-placed flashbacks, we gather that Julia had been abused as a child by their father; she now feels guilty for abandoning her brother years ago, and while her return was predicated on their father's death, Paul's own potential trauma remains open for interpretation. A west coast equivalent of the Midwest Rust Belt, the town has its share of other problems, though we will only focus on one in this story.

One of Julia's students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), checks all the boxes with which she's all too familiar. The quietest and oddest kid in her class, he's jumpy and skittish; when called on to share a story, he tells a dark and almost inappropriate tale, inspired by his own graphic hand-drawn pictures. Suspecting abuse at home, she takes an active interest in him, stalking Lucas through town and getting him ice cream to get him to open up. She learns his mother recently died and that Lucas and his brother are in their father Frank's custody, which everyone darkly seems to understand as a bad thing. We don't have a clear reason for this, but the filmmakers make it pretty clear that Frank is a drug dealer and user.

In fact, the film centers more on Lucas than on Julia, though Russell carries its dramatic heft. This is most clear in its opening sequence, which introduces us to Lucas and Frank, as Frank tells him to wait in the car as he finishes up work in the mine. The effective production design and cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister (Official Secrets, A Quiet Passion, Mortdecai, In Secret, The Deep Blue Sea, and AMC's The Terror, which bears remarkable similarities with this project) draw our attention sharply to the blue-collar atmosphere that has turned to waste as well as the profound darkness of this story's aesthetic. In their meth-cooking lab, Frank and his associate are attacked by something large and animalistic; a curious and concerned Lucas slowly makes his way inside to find his father before the scene ends. Later, we learn Frank is locked up upstairs in his own house, with Lucas trying to support and feed himself and his brother while caring for their father. As we've seen in del Toro's other works, real-life horror and supernatural darkness often fit uncannily well together, and Cooper's oeuvre has never been so rich with dramatic and thematic potential, in my opinion, than here.

Unfortunately, I don't think most of the themes here are mined to the best level of articulation, either visually or didactically. But this is a horror movie -- a creature feature, at that -- and simply surveying some of these ideas is a daring move. It would be easy to focus on the legend or myth (SPOILER: it's a wendigo), the possession aspect, or even the kills, but the filmmakers are more concerned with the drama between these characters and their pasts. Indeed, once Frank is unveiled as a monstrous beast, the movie reveals its true colors as well, and the second half of the movie lumbers into recognizable beats, scares, and violence. The focus, however, never strays from Julia's concern for Lucas, Paul's concern for Julia, or our concern for this group of children, young and old, fighting for survival against abusive parents and the trauma they inflict.

Antlers is not a feel-good movie. Bleak and shadowy in tone as well as imagery, there is almost no humor to break up the cruelty and pain. A talented supporting cast -- including Rory Cochrane, Amy Madigan, and Graham Greene -- pop in for a few lovely scenes, but they, like the leads, seem to be putting in a lot of work to make their minimal dialogue and presence feel natural and dynamic. It's the kind of thankless project A-listers do to prove their mettle -- in a project underwritten, almost determined to make their jobs challenging -- but goes largely ignored or forgotten by mass audiences. But if you're willing to get on its weighty wavelength, Antlers has boons to offer arthouse horror fans in its folktale storytelling, its attention to generational trauma and grief and addiction, its actors' performances and technical performativity, and its technical proficiency.