Review: Antlers Trades the Power of Myth for Elevated, Creature-Feature Thrills

In Antlers, the big bad is never supposed to be as scary as society’s collective wrongdoing.

Antlers
Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Scott Cooper has built a career full of muscular dramas dedicated to the fading myth of the capital-A American outlaw. With the Guillermo del Toro-produced Antlers, the filmmaker’s first foray into horror, he fashions a creature feature based off of a different kind of myth: the wendigo, an evil spirit common to indigenous cultures. Seeing as this is a horror story of the exceedingly elevated variety, Cooper—working off of a screenplay by him, Henry Chaisson, and Nick Antosca based on the latter’s short story “The Quiet Boy”—attempts a feverish rumination on nothing less than society’s collective wrongdoing. In Antlers, the monster in question is never supposed to be as scary as the sins that we have wrought.

Set among the sylvan surroundings of a depressed mining town in Oregon, the film revolves around young Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), who lives in a crumbling house with his younger brother, Aiden (Sawyer Jones), and their volatile addict of a father, Frank (Scott Haze). While tagging along as Frank ventures into the local coal mines and the meth labs hidden within, Lucas bears witness to an attack on his father by an unknown beast. As a result of the attack, Frank is infected with something, growing increasingly rabid until he locks himself in the attic of their home and urges his sons not to let him out. After Aiden comes down with this sickness as well and joins his father upstairs, Lucas is left to mind the house and scour the surrounding landscape for meat to bring home to his suddenly ravenous kin.

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Lucas’s progressively disheveled state doesn’t go unnoticed by his teacher, Julia Meadows (Keri Russell), who in one especially predictable scene instructs her class on the history and importance of fables and myths, at which point Antlers all but announces its intentions as a supernaturally tinged allegory about domestic violence. Julia sees aspects of herself in Lucas, as she endured a childhood of abuse. She’s recently returned to the hometown that she fled years prior and now lives with her formerly estranged brother, Paul (Jesse Plemons), the newly appointed local sheriff. Julia decides to make it her mission to intervene in the physical and psychological agony that she keenly senses that Lucas is going through.

There’s a striking vulnerability to Russell’s performance that generates immediate empathy, and goes a long way toward papering over the clichés of Julia’s characterization as a recovering alcoholic who’s prone to being snuck up on while lost in her thoughts. And Russell accomplishes that with little more than the intensity of her gaze, especially in small moments where she stares longingly at the bottles of liquor that tempt her at the general store.

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Generational trauma, though, isn’t the only thing that Antlers is eager to tackle, as the filmmakers are quick to postulate how both the wholesale pillaging of the environment and the widespread opioid crisis are also intersecting to allow the evil wendigo spirit to find fertile ground to unleash its potential. Florian Hoffmeister’s suggestively stark imagery elicits an atmosphere of almost post-apocalyptic doom, where our mistreatment of the Earth and of our bodies has resulted in unavoidable spiritual and ancestral consequences.

These are vital ideas, of course, but it becomes readily apparent that the filmmakers may have bitten off more than they can chew, as Antlers lackadaisically flits from one source of societal malaise to the next with little rhyme or reason. In such moments, your mind may wander toward Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo and The Last Winter, films that are far more sensitively attuned to the rifts that open up in the swamp of a destructively imperialist way of life. This film’s themes, by contrast, come to feel like fashionably dismal window dressing, something that becomes more conspicuous once the story rushes into a noisy and action-packed finale that gives in to all the run-of-the-mill tropes that it initially seemed bent on avoiding.

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The film’s most problematic aspect, though, is that for all its aspirations to tackle timely issues within the context of the mythology of the wendigo, it doesn’t make purposeful room for the indigenous people whose ancestors were the originators of the folklore. Graham Greene, as Warren Stokes, appears in a brief scene, but it’s only for his character to helpfully explain the origins of the wendigo to an incredulous Julia and Paul before vanishing from the film.

“The ancestral spirits have been here long before us and will be here long after,” Warren explains, “And now they’re angry.” It’s an understandable sentiment given everything that Antlers has rubbed the audience’s faces in up until this point. But this is ultimately a film that markedly aligns itself with its wide-eyed white protagonists and their fight against a mythic “othered” boogeyman in the woods, while the subtextual critiques are eventually abandoned in favor of showing off the snazzy creature effects of its central monster.

Score: 
 Cast: Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, Amy Madigan  Director: Scott Cooper  Screenwriter: C. Henry Chaisson, Nick Antosca, Scott Cooper  Distributor: Searchlight Pictures  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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