Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum opens with a tracking shot, lit by the setting sun, that captures shards of life at a Deep South plantation. Across the impressive eight-minute sequence, we catch glimpses of frolicking white children and soldiers marching, then something altogether worse once the camera enters the slave quarters. The stage would appear to be set for a disquisition on America’s historical sins, but Bush and Renz are more interested in the way some today would venerate those sins. This is a film that, in sync with the Jordan Peele School of Genre Filmmaking, employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.
Antebellum is divided into three parts. In the first, Janelle Monáe plays Eden, a slave living in interbellum Louisiana, and in the second, she plays Veronica, an academic author and TV talking head with a PhD, chic house, supportive husband (Marque Richardson), and darling daughter (London Boyce). For a spell, it’s unclear if and how these women are connected, but any frustration that results from that uncertainty is quelled by the film’s powerful payoff.
The film’s second part trots along as a portrait of a likable, if unexciting, woman palling around with her sassy best friend (Gabourey Sidibe) and a colleague (Lily Cowles). Veronica attends a conference, where suggestions of the past and Antebellum’s first third linger like spirits: a white girl in 19th-century garb, a painting of a plantationscape, a horse-drawn carriage, and a white woman (Jena Malone) who suggests a slave catcher with a cellphone.
The vaguely menacing tone of this section contrasts with the baroque suffering depicted in the first, which feels cartoonish and fetishistic in its close-ups of screams and tears; at one point, a suffering slave (Tongayi Chirisa) literally rends his garments in anguish. Black women are branded and raped. There’s one shy, almost sweet Confederate soldier (Robert Aramayo) who, behind closed doors, becomes a face-smacking dehumanizer. And the plantation overseer (Jack Huston) has a mustache that you expect him to twirl.
The savagery of the slaveholding South was loathsome, terrifying, and unforgivable, but the film is all brutality and no gentility, with pure villains on one side and pure victims on the other—mere stock types. These horrors are more awful and true when committed by humans, not monsters (think of Leonard DiCaprio’s hideous character in Django Unchained, decorous yet vicious), and more instructive to our present, when racists may not recognize themselves in sheer brutes and thus excuse or forgive their own abhorrent behavior. Yesterday’s slavers are today’s neighbors, not a mythical and extinct species from antiquity.
But then, surprisingly, that turns out to be Antebellum’s point. (Spoilers herein.) The third act reveals the second was a flashback, not a chronological leap forward—that Monáe’s characters are the same, and that Veronica was kidnapped at her conference, renamed Eden, and brought to a tiny recreated Confederate state carved out of Southern wilderness. There, a rogue group of psychotic racists are reenacting not just the battles of the Civil War, but the social conditions surrounding them, kidnapping black professors and authors and forcing them to relive the monstrous realities of the 19th century. It’s a race-conscious The Village, a Westworld sans robots, 12 Years a Slave recast in the 21st century.
We’re used to seeing the brutality of chattel slavery through the lens of history, which puts it at a more comfortable distance. But Antebellum’s twist, showing us supremacists playing dress-up in the here and now, makes such barbarism feel even more outrageous and abhorrent, no longer cloaked in the safety of the bygone. These familiar atrocities are made fresh. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” goes one of William Faulkner’s best-known lines, which the film uses as both epigraph and dialogue. Antebellum makes it literal, showing what Trump-era reverence for the Confederacy—its flag, its statuary, its “heritage”—actually means.
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