Mark Reviews Movies: ANTLERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 28, 2021

Monsters are rarely just monsters. The world would be much simpler if monsters were real (which is part of why people believe in such supernatural, otherworldly, or extraterrestrial things). We'd have a specific thing to blame, and that thing definitely wouldn't be us or what we've done or what we've created. That makes a monster an easy metaphor in fiction, because it can stand in for whatever horrors people do to themselves or to others.

In Antlers, there is a monster, which is meant to represent a few things about some terrible and destructive elements of human nature. The filmmakers want to ensure that we don't miss those connections, so those real-world horrors also exist in a literal sense within this tale. That decision, though, creates a significant issue here: It renders the monster irrelevant and turns it into a confused metaphor, which undercuts the actual point of this story.

Co-writer/director Scott Cooper's movie at least begins on the right, if overly familiar, track of mystery and allegory. In a small town somewhere in Oregon, two men are ransacking an abandoned mine for items or scraps that might have any kind of value. There's a lot in this location and these characters' actions—about general economic devastation and the personal repercussions of that. When the men encounter some unseen terror, awakened by their presence and set on hunting them, in that mine, it's both a predictable payoff to the teasing prologue of a horror story and a tacit promise that this monster's existence means something.

It does eventually mean something—a couple of things, actually. By the time that point arrives, though, the screenplay—written by Cooper, Henry Chaisson, and Nick Antosca (based on his short story "The Quiet Boy")—has become too invested in the real world, real problems, and real faults of humanity for a mere monster to explain, excuse, or repair any of those issues.

The central mystery involves a young boy named Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), who lives in the remote outskirts of and attends school in this town. His teacher is Julia (Keri Russell), who has returned to this place to live with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), the local Sheriff. Julia is concerned about Lucas and his situation at home.

The boy's father Frank (Scott Haze), one of the two men who went into that mine at the story's start, hasn't been seen or heard from since his expedition, and neither has Lucas' younger brother Aiden (Sawyer Jones), who was waiting in the truck for his dad. This, the school administration and local law enforcement believe, is depressingly normal for Frank and this town in general. Frank is addicted to drugs, and a good number of kids from similar households only go to school to help their parents buy or sell the source of that addiction.

Julia, though, suspects Lucas is the victim of long-standing and ongoing abuse. She knows the signs, because her own father was abusive. That's why she left this place, and that's why she determined to make sure Lucas is and remains safe.

Early on, all of this is grounded in authentic despair and treated with aching sincerity by Cooper, as well as the actors (Florian Hoffmeister's dreary cinematography complements the hushed tones of the performers). If there is a monster to be found here, its effect and significance seem to dissipate with every new development and revelation about what Lucas has experienced and, as an ancillary point, what Julia has spent most of her life trying to escape.

It's almost as if that opening scene, captured within the darkness of the mine and edited with little sense of cohesion, is nothing more than a nightmare or a fairy tale, like the one Lucas tells in class after Julia assigns it as homework. The screenplay makes explicit points about fairy tales and, as the plot progresses, folklore existing as a way to rationalize the terror of reality. Could any monster match the fear and trauma of this boy, locked away in his bedroom at night to avoid a howling father outside and drawing bloody scenes of family members devouring each other.

That's the challenge the filmmakers have presented themselves, as the movie develops into something far more in line with straightforward and supernatural horror. It's also a challenge that, despite some convincingly grisly effects of transformation and a couple of effectively suspenseful sequences, they're pretty much fated to fail.

Any development of these characters ends once the real threat—a creature from Native American myth—emerges. Similarly, all of this real-world despair and pain gives way to scenes of the monster stalking and inflicting bloody violence on expendable characters. The monster itself, which transforms a victim into something inhuman and passes along that curse, is almost too obvious in its metaphorical intentions to actually put into words.

As such, though, the shift from reality to the supernatural feels, at best, a bit exploitative and, at worst, completely defeatist, especially during the hopeless climax and an almost sacrificial act of euthanasia. In turning real horror into a tangible monster, Antlers does a disservice to both.

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