I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie since I first learned about it a couple of years ago. Like many films, it hit a hard pause at the beginning of the pandemic. So, you can imagine my excitement when it finally dropped! I called up my usual suspects of like-minded creature feature fans and we hit the theater. Then this movie happened to us. Here’s the short explanation of the overall emotional response I (and many of my group) had through watching this movie;
- 15 minutes in – STOKED!
- 40 minutes in – Worrieeeeddd…
- 1:15 minutes in – Hopeful?
- By the end – Annoyed
I’m not going to say this movie was bad. That would just be lazy. This movie has a ton going on, and I’m going to break it down into the “Good, Bad, and Ugly” without straying too far into spoiler territory. If you’re an avid fan of creature films, you’re probably going to want to see Antlers. Who are we kidding, you’ve likely already seen it and have been spending the last few weeks trying to process a cogent response as we have. I do think there are a lot of reasons to support this film by seeing it. Especially if this is a genre you want to see grow and be valued by the studios. What the production team got right about Antlers is really good! There’s just a good deal of stuff that negatively impacts the overall story and experience–at least for me and those I’ve discussed it with. Okay, enough palaver, let’s get into it!
THE GOOD
The first thing I’ve got to gush about Antlers on is that this movie is BEAUTIFUL. The atmosphere that director Scott Cooper, cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and art director Cheryl Marion created is so dreadful, eerie, and yet at the same time sublime. Scenes that would be dark and obscure in reality, were perfectly lit to give that sense without completely losing the detail of the focal subject matter. All the lighting, in fact, felt very organic and “correct.” Whatever the light source was, whether a chemical flare, police lights, or a small flashlight, the colors and amount of light provided always felt very real, and that helped tremendously for me to get pulled into the dread and anxiety of each scene.
The locations were also incredibly gorgeous. The wide shots of the open country of Oregon, where this film is set, provide a sense of scale and solitude that makes the audience feel alienated, while at the same time having a very suppressive and claustrophobic quality. I loved every frame of the wide shots of the landscape and the town rooted in this oppressive mountainscape looming over it.
The other big thing that I want to make sure I praise about this movie is the performances. Specifically, the performance of one of the lead actors, Jeremy T. Thomas, who plays the young boy, Lucas Weaver, at the center of the story. I believe this was his first lead in a feature-length film and he absolutely carried the tone and gravitas of this movie. That’s an incredible feat for both Jeremy and the director to pull off, and it says a lot about their ability to work together and find the performance that is critical for a story like this. While Jeremy is 15 years old, he’s still very young to be asked to pull together a performance of this quality, and that has a lot to do with his trust–-and the quality of the guidance–he has in Scott Cooper.
It’s for this reason in particular that I really want to see more from this director and this production team. As far as skill and competency, this team proved to have all the right ingredients to create an incredibly effective and beautiful film. However…
THE BAD
So, I don’t want to be mean-spirited or overly harsh, but it has to be said that the script of this movie has a lot of problems. It’s just not good. They seemed to be trying to do a lot of things in a movie posing as a creature feature with a run time of 100 minutes. The number of plot threads that they attempt to weave into this story quickly start to unravel under the pressure of the time restraint and the structure they’ve put together. It just seems to try and do too much. The script is based on the short story The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca, and the short story format being stretched into a full feature-length film becomes pretty evident from the first viewing.
As I said, all the performances were executed very well. The problems become apparent when you try to understand the motives and perspectives of each character as they continually need to be tasked with carrying more and more subtext in their performance. A prime example of that is in the relationship between the two characters Julia Meadows (played by Keri Russell) and Paul Meadows (played by Jesse Plemons). They play estranged siblings that have recently started living together in the home they both grew up in. Without going into spoilers, their relationship is complex and strained by past family trauma that has left them both dealing with crises of identity, substance abuse, and bitterness towards one another. With the main storyline constantly pushing them forward, the few times we get glimpses into their history and relationship cannot be properly established or explored so they read more as distractions for the sake of “messaging” rather than critical to their character arcs and final resolutions. Their relationship in itself could carry an entire movie if that had been the focus, but it isn’t. As it is, their family trauma feels more like a heavy trope than it does a core part of the story.
This all comes to a head in the third act of this film where things genuinely seem to fall apart. The climax and following denouement are painfully disconnected from the core plot of the original story because there is so much sub-plot the story has to attempt to resolve. As an audience member, I was just left annoyed with all the emotional territory I was asked to relate to while having no fulfilling resolution for the characters. Having a movie with a bummer ending is a totally valid and satisfying conclusion when it’s earned. This movie just doesn’t earn the audience’s response they seem to be demanding.
THE UGLY
Okay, so now I need to spend a little time talking about the biggest problem with this movie–for me at least. As I said, I’m not going to go too far into spoilers, but suffice to say that this movie is based on a pretty well-known mythological creature from the folklore of several indigenous people groups. That in and of itself was one of the things that really made me excited to see this film. However, the execution becomes incredibly problematic. The handling of the mythology, and its original links with the indigenous community, are pretty lazily executed in my opinion.
First, there is only one indigenous actor in the entire movie. While I love Graham Greene as an actor, I don’t think he was given much at all to work with within this script. He’s had an amazing career that has made him one of the most recognizable indigenous actors working in Hollywood today, and it becomes pretty obvious that the casting team might have selected him for this role solely based on that fact. He’s regularly cast as a “non-threatening” indigenous person who has–for a variety of reasons–embraced or accepted what we’ll call “colonial” social perspectives. That makes him easy for a broad audience to accept.
Why couldn’t the studio have introduced any of the many emerging talented indigenous actors available today to audiences? I think it would have read as much more informed and conscientious filmmaking than what we got here. I think of many actors that have been introduced to audiences recently that are provocative and informative about their culture and social perspective. A great example of this is the new series Reservation Dogs, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. There are amazing performances from actors Gary Farmer, Wes Studi, or Zahn McClarnon who would have brought a lot to this role. Again, that’s not a slight on Graham Greene’s performance, just a read on what I think might have been some lazy casting.
But, maybe I’m making too much of the casting. After all, Graham Greene is only in about 10 minutes of this film that uses an infamous creature from indigenous lore as its main focal point. Yeah, that’s right. He gets a couple of establishing scenes and then one small exposition dump as the “indigenous expert” on the mythology. It’s not just a trope, it’s kind of gross. It ends up just coming across as the most egregious cultural appropriation I’ve seen in a long time.
The film seems to take a really provocative, and potentially amazing, mythological creature from a very specific cultural group of people, and then drapes it haphazardly across a bunch of “white people problems.” That’s not to say that other people groups, including indigenous communities, don’t deal with things like family trauma, substance abuse, poverty, failing education systems, or post-industrial social erosion. They do! In fact, some (myself included) might say that this particular story told through that lens would have been exponentially more engaging. As it is, Antlers is a white movie. Like super white. With all the baggage, cringe, and problematic behavior that brings.
All that to say this. Antlers is a well-acted, beautiful, potentially provocative, but ultimately messy and tone-deaf movie. If I had to offer up a movie that does similar things, but with a better heart of respect for the source material and original mythology, I’d point you to Jeremy Saulnier’s 2018 film, Hold the Dark. That film had many of the same potential dangers and problems that Antlers has, but the execution is incredibly different.
In conclusion, I’ll just say a few things about the actual creature design. There are many people who have differing opinions about the creature design in Antlers. I’m in the camp of, it’s fine. I wasn’t scared by it, I wasn’t really even impressed by it, but I think the effects were well done. If you’re going into this movie solely for the cool creature effects, there are some gems in here, but nothing that’s going to make you want to rush out and find a high-quality action figure model or another piece of merch. It’s altogether forgetful, and deeply and negatively affected by the things I’ve mentioned above.
Without opening up another complete rant, I will also just say that to be a story about a creature that is known to stalk the unexplored wilderness places–while being in a movie set in the PERFECT backdrop to some really potentially creepy and beautiful shots–this monster sure does spend a lot of time in houses and other tight spots. It’s kind of like the worst version of a Harry and the Hendersons remake you could ask for.