ANTLERS (2021)

Studio:     Fox Searchlight
Director:    Scott Cooper
Writer:     C. Henry Chaisson, Nick Antosca, Scott Cooper
Producer:  Guillermo del Toro, David S. Goyer, J. Miles Dale
Stars:     Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, Amy Madigan

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Estranged siblings struggle to save a young boy when a mythical monster envelops their small town in a murderous mystery.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

A wendigo kills Kenny Glass and mauls Frank Weaver as the two men make meth in an abandoned coalmine. The mythical monster’s bite causes Frank to begin a slow transformation into another wendigo. Believing his feral father can be saved if he completes the metamorphosis, Frank’s 12-year-old son Lucas secretly keeps Frank captive inside their remote house, partly to protect his seven-year-old brother Aiden, who eventually begins his own transformation after Frank attacks him.

Having left town 20 years earlier to escape an abusive father, recovering alcoholic Julia Meadows returns to Cispus Falls to work as a schoolteacher. Julia temporarily moves in with her brother Paul, the town’s current sheriff, which sparks several confrontations due to their troubled childhoods and Julia feeling guilty for abandoning Paul.

Based on the boy’s disturbing drawings and his strange story about a family of hungry bears becoming monsters, Julia takes an interest in Lucas’s wellbeing. While attempting to bond with Lucas and investigating his home life, Julia becomes concerned that Lucas and his brother may also come from a broken family.

Native American and former sheriff Warren Stokes finds half of Kenny Glass’s mauled corpse while hiking in the woods. Police later locate the other half in the coalmine. Stokes collects an antler and notes native wards hanging throughout the mine.

Julia shows Lucas’s unsettling illustrations to Principal Ellen Booth. Despite initial reservations about interfering, Ellen agrees to go to the Weaver house and speak to Frank about his son. Upon entering the home, Ellen finds Aiden in an alarmingly disheveled state. Frank savagely slaughters Ellen. A wendigo then bursts out of Frank’s body.

Classmate Clint Owens tries to bully Lucas on his walk home from school. Now transformed into the wendigo, Frank viciously attacks Clint unexpectedly. Lucas flees home to find his brother Aiden missing and Ellen Booth ripped apart on the floor.

Julia tries convincing her brother that Ellen and Clint’s disappearances may be connected to Frank Weaver. Paul and his deputy, Daniel LeCroy, briefly visit Frank’s house, but leave after finding no one home.

Julia goes back to the Weaver house on her own. Finding Ellen’s car outside leads to the discovery of her body inside. Paul and the police also find the unusual husk of Frank’s human body.

Lucas is sent to the hospital to be treated for malnourishment and physical abuse. Julia and Paul argue over Julia’s impulse to become Lucas’s guardian while his case gets sorted.

Julia and Paul take Lucas’s drawings to Stokes. Stokes shows the antler he took from the mine as he recounts the ancient legend of cannibalism cursing people to become creatures. Paul finds the wendigo tale too fantastical to believe as an explanation for the brutal deaths.

Julia and Paul bring Lucas to their house. Julia tells Lucas that his father died, but Lucas claims his dad was reborn and that as long as he is fed, Frank will love him again. Lucas adds that Frank will come to take him to the mine with Aiden.

Noises lead Daniel to investigate the shed outside the Meadows house. Dan finds Aiden hiding just before the wendigo suddenly kills Dan from behind.

Paul rushes home in response to Dan’s call. The creature violently attacks Paul. As Julia helps her brother recover, Lucas follows Aiden and the wendigo back to the mine.

Julia drives to the mine and confronts the creature to save the two boys. Having a change of heart about what really happened to his father, Lucas ultimately helps Julia bring down the monster. Julia cuts out the wendigo’s cursed heart.

Julia and Lucas observe Aiden undergoing his transformation into the next wendigo. Lucas insists Aiden is merely sick. Julia manages to convince Lucas that it is too late to save his brother. Julia apologetically embraces Aiden before stabbing him to death.

Julia and Paul uneasily agree to continue caring for Lucas. However, Paul privately worries the curse may continue when he coughs up discolored blood due to his wendigo wound.

---

Review:

When it’s finally all said and done, COVID-19 will take the bulk of the blame for many movies losing multiple games of release date roulette, and becoming box office duds by default. Some of those fingers may be pinning commercial failure on the correct culprit. Many more of them will merely be exploiting the dying theater industry’s pandemic-hastened problems as a convenient cover story for the real reason why audiences didn’t turn out.

“Antlers” fell prey to unfavorable circumstances. Shot in 2018, the film suffered several COVID-related delays over the better part of a two-year span, and wouldn’t debut until 2021 was almost over. “Antlers” bears the additional burden of being a Searchlight Pictures production caught up in Disney’s buyout of Fox, changing hands to less vested owners who’d adopted children they weren’t sure what to do with.

During that time, horror fans still stayed hot for the film. Those who did venture out to the multiplex could count on seeing the trailer whether it was July of 2020 or September of 2021. Genre outlets like Fangoria published ongoing coverage including interviews and featured articles. And with a vetted veteran like Guillermo del Toro attached above the title, the movie remained at the top of many “Can’t Wait to See” lists no matter where or how often the release date moved.

So you can see where someone might measure high anticipation against poor box office numbers and conclude, “COVID must have killed this one, right?” Not so fast. “Antlers” would have been a collective shoulder shrug even in a pre-pandemic world. The real reason many people moved right along without stopping to look is because the film is aggressively average, even by mainstream thriller standards. Built out of basic beats, “Antlers” isn’t at all equipped to sustain a spot in pop culture’s consciousness for longer than it takes the end credits to finish scrolling.

Co-writer Nick Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy” inspired “Antlers.” “The Quiet Boy” only takes a couple of minutes to read, putting producers in a “Lawnmower Man”-like predicament where they had to put flesh on a skeleton that was barely more than a bone. And by adhering to an underwhelming formula, they put that flesh into a very vanilla suit of skin.

Tasked with turning an extremely short story into a feature-length script, how can someone quickly create a character capable of carrying 99 new pages of content? Through two-word traits and backstory bites. The bio for Julia Meadows, a schoolteacher recently returned to the tucked-away hometown where her brother now works as the sheriff, looks like this: Recovering alcoholic. Traumatic childhood. Sibling estrangement. Professional failure. With only eight routine words, the filmmakers establish a pedestrian personality, then let Keri Russell sell Julia’s standardized story with lip-licking leers at liquor bottles on a store shelf.

Although the undemanding screenplay doesn’t tax her talent in award-worthy ways, Russell manages to eke out an effective performance. The same goes for Jesse Plemons, another actor equally incapable of being anything less than completely captivating even in mundane movie moments, as her lawman brother Paul. One advantage afforded by casting names like theirs is that “Antlers” attracts interest from everyday moviegoers who otherwise wouldn’t notice a mid-road monster movie. Another advantage is that performers of their ilk can push middling material all the way to the edge of its ordinary borders.

The conflict between their characters comes from Julia feeling guilty about abandoning her brother when she left their abusive home 20 years ago. This gives Russell and Plemons plenty of time to shoot heartbroken looks at each other during tense interactions over their problematic past. It also gives Julia a thematic redemption arc when she takes an interest in a 12-year-old student, Lucas, who appears to need rescuing from a similarly broken home. That’s what we call killing two narrative necessities with one simple stone.

Meanwhile, the movie makes mood out of overcast skies and sad piano music blanketing bleakness over a tiny town with a dead coalmining trade. Atmospheric ambiance continues taking cues from classic chiller chestnuts by way of flashlights waving down dark corridors, growls echoing in the distance, and jump scares courtesy of inadvertently sneaking up suddenly over someone’s shoulder.

The suspense part of the plot concerns Lucas secretly keeping a creature locked up in his home. It turns out that this mythical monster, an antlered wendigo, is the boy’s father undergoing a feral transformation. Julia sees the warning signs of disturbing drawings as well as a strange tale Lucas tells in her writing class and reasons his welfare is endangered. When several savage murders put the police in a panic, Julia instead realizes everyone in town might be in trouble, and an ancient curse could be the cause.

“Antlers” finds contentment in threadbare thrills. The story stays so slender that secondary players only exist to nudge things forward while several scenes only serve to stall that progression from moving too fast. It’s a yo-yo between yawns and mild interest that’s studded with other notable names in nothing roles, like Amy Madigan as a school principal who is ultimately just a notch for the body count, or Graham Greene as the token Native American in sole possession of exposition that will eventually let everyone know what’s really going on.

The finale includes a terribly tragic event that’s incredibly dark, even for a horror movie. However, rather than land what probably read as an emotional gut-punch on paper, it becomes another “no big deal” moment in a film full of them, with no one in the audience anywhere near invested enough to empathetically care. That’s a notion fitting for “Antlers” as a whole. Revisionist history might make out the movie to be one more victim of COVID. Truth is, mediocrity fated the film to fizzle and be forgotten regardless.

Review Score: 55

---