ANTLERS Promises Much, Delivers Far Too Little
A missed opportunity for Cooper and company
Whoever created the trailer for Antlers, the Guillermo del Toro-produced, Scott Cooper-directed supernatural horror entry out this week, deserves at minimum a raise for selling an entirely different film than the one Cooper (Hostiles, Black Mass, Crazy Heart) and his co-screenwriters, C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca (whose short story, “The Quiet Boy,” forms the basis for Antlers), put together. Slow to the point of plodding, nonsensical to the point of absurdity, and superficial in its exploration of presumably profound themes, Antlers might just be the biggest disappointment inflicted on unwitting horror audiences since Halloween Kills undermined everything that made the 2018 legacy sequel, Halloween, a perfect capper to the long-running Michael Myers series.
An obvious first-timer to the genre, Cooper embraces the art-horror convention of starting slow and going slower until all heck finally breaks loose in the second half of overlong, over-indulgent Antlers’ running time. On its own, deliberate, meditative, ruminative pacing isn’t or shouldn’t be a problem, but it also sets up an implicit social contract with audiences: Stay with us through the mega-slow parts and you’ll be rewarded with terrors and horrors beyond imagining (except we’ll imagine them for you). The titular creature, an antlered, animatronic monstrosity, looks impressive once it’s finally shown in all of its grisly glory. Unfortunately, the title monster’s full appearance doesn’t happen until the last, shadow-drenched moments in a dimly lit, underground cave.
Set in a perpetually gray, overcast Oregon dominated by dampness and despair, Antlers ostensibly centers on Julia Meadows (Keri Russell), a former self-exile who once, long ago, left the tiny, economically depressed town where she was raised for metaphorically greener pastures in California. The death of her father, an abusive man shown briefly in flashbacks, along with the long-held, long unresolved childhood trauma, draws Julia back to Oregon and her younger brother, Paul (Jesse Plemons), the town’s local sheriff. Haunted by guilt for abandoning Paul to their father, Julia hopes to make amends by cohabiting with Paul in their childhood home. It’s probably not the best decision for either Julia or Paul’s mental health. Like other questionable decisions made by Julia, Paul, and multiple background characters, it’s also one not fully justified by Cooper’s screenplay.
Naturally attuned to signs of abuse, mistreatment, and neglect, Julia becomes increasingly concerned by one of her preteen students, Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas). Small and slight for his age, Lucas navigates everything from the usual elementary school bullies to a genuinely disturbing home life with a preternatural calm that helps him survive moment-to-moment, but doesn’t bode well for his immediate or long-term future. Lucas’s home life, however, is far, far worse than even Julia can imagine. The monsters with human faces Julia has encountered in her own life are nothing compared to the members of Lucas’s biological family who scamper, growl, and hunger behind a padlocked door.
Between the Pacific Northwest setting and its connection to Native Americans, their folklore, and the existential threat presented by that folklore made literal flesh, Antlers has more than enough promise to carry a full-length, narrative film. Adding the real world-based generational and intergenerational trauma experienced by Julia and Lucas separately, however, leads to an incredibly unsubtle, nuance-free, heavy-handed approach to thematic material that Cooper repeatedly mishandles and even bungles on occasion. More often than not, Cooper seems content to simply turn subtext into text, explain what the characters are seeing or experiencing via dialogue to the audience, and leaving it mostly unexplored.
Cooper also relies on a tried-and-true horror trope, characters shedding IQ points as the story and/or their fates demand, typical of a novice filmmaker. Several times, characters wander into potentially dangerous or even deadly situations alone or without calling for backup. Considering that the tiny Oregon town where Antlers unfolds seems to have a police force of two or three cops, including Paul, a single deputy, Daniel Lecroy (Rory Cochrane), and Paul’s predecessor as sheriff, Warren Stokes (Graham Greene), mostly present in Antlers to drop Native-American wisdom on his Caucasian listeners, it’s no wonder the titular monster runs amok without interruption or interference, leaving gnarly, gruesomely depicted body parts in its wake.
When we do get glimpses of the monster’s rampage in and around the town, Antlers borders on the truly nightmarish, suggesting a monster from the region’s collective id wreaking revenge for centuries-old crimes named and unnamed. Alas, those moments, each one a testament to a stellar makeup/practical effects team, are too few and far between, leaving Russell, Plemons, and, to be fair, an extraordinary Thomas to carry Antlers’ emotional weight or heft from scene to scene. The titular monster, nor the performances, though, are enough to elevate Antlers beyond the merely serviceable or a missed opportunity for Cooper and company to deliver a truly one-of-a-kind horror film.
Antlers opens in theaters on Friday, October 29th.
