A Reel Review: ANTLERS

In the last 12 years, director Scott Cooper has become one of those filmmakers who lands on a lot of must-see lists. In 2009 he guided Jeff Bridges to an Oscar with CRAZY HEART, turned Johnny Depp into a gangster in BLACK MASS (2015), and helmed the outstanding Western HOSTILES in 2017. Here in 2021 he teams up with creature-feature producer Guillermo del Toro for the supernatural horror film, ANTLERS. 

 

Julia (Keri Russell), a schoolteacher, suspects that one of her students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), is secretly keeping a supernatural creature hidden in his house. 

 

Based on the short story The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca, ANTLERS mostly operates as a mystery. In the early goings, young Lucas and his meth-cooking father are ambushed in an abandoned mine by some unknown creature, and later Julia, along with the audience, are led to believe that Lucas is keeping said creature as a pet. An early twist happens as we learn (slight spoiler here), that Lucas is actually keeping his infected father and younger brother locked up…both of whom seem to be slowly transforming into something else. 

 

While director Scott Cooper is slowly unraveling an effective mystery, he’s also making one hell of a horror flick with good scares and a creepy atmosphere. Unfortunately, once the mystery is uncloaked (which happens fairly early), the rest of the film becomes blandly predictable even for anyone who has never seen a horror movie. Cooper at the same time is playing with plenty of subtext; including lower-class families whose children fall through the system, small towns that are vanishing due to declining coal industry, and American Indian legends. 

 

Filmed on location in British Columbia (in the same town where FIRST BLOOD was filmed in 1982), the film looks gorgeous despite being in endless rainfall and sunless skies. Editing is crisp and the gore is glorious. The creature itself, when it does come, is horrific and grotesque. Cooper only shows the creature in fleeting glimpses which really works well. But in doing a horror film there are still traps that Cooper falls into, with the old trick of hapless characters venturing into spooky places they would naturally flee from. 

 

Acting is good from the small cast. Keri Russell handles everything well despite her character getting a lot of backstory that never seems to come back into play. Jesse Plemons comes in as her brother and local sheriff and does well. The support cast of young Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, and Amy Madigan all handle their roles well. 

 

The final battle and solution to kill the creature is handled with zero imagination and tension, and one has to wonder if there were discussions on set on how to do it best or if something got changed in the editing…and then an epilogue offers a slight twist that doesn’t work as well as it thinks it does. In the end ANTLERS pokes in as a horrific (in a good way) body-horror creature feature that delivers as just as much as it misses. 

 

BOTTOM LINE: Rent it