I tend to start these with a short anecdote, and I had one all set up for this one about the history of how I found out about this movie, but then something happened while I was at the multiplex. The movie had started, I was starting to get into it, when I heard some voices in the corridor in what sounded like Spanish. Enter three people, two of whom take seats next to me, one in the row ahead. One of them, the one beside me, kept bouncing in her seat, such that I could feel it, whispering to the one next to her, pelting the one in front of us with popcorn, flashing her phone, and I think she took her shoes off. Not cool, man.
Keep in mind that might have hampered my ability to enjoy the movie a little.
After a short prologue showing a pair of guys working a meth lab in an abandoned mine before something grabs them and possibly the one man’s young son, the movie introduces us to Julia Meadows (Keri Russell). She’s a grade school teacher for a small Oregon elementary school, back in town after leaving to avoid an abusive father years earlier. She’s currently residing with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), the newly elected town sheriff. One of Julia’s students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), seems withdrawn and isolated from the other students. But see, Jeremy has a secret. His father was one of the men from the opening, and both Lucas’s father and kid brother are, well, sick.
I don’t know how much to add here in terms of setting up the basic plot, but that does seem to match the synopses I saw before I went myself: a small child has to take care of his father and brother while still going to school even as they turn into…something else.
But as for the movie, Antlers is not the sort of movie that makes the audience comfortable. The opening crawl tells the audience what to expect, and part of it is about how even before a creature of some kind appears on screen, this is a town with a lot of pain. The environmental damage caused by, from the looks of things, the mining and lumber industries is clear to see, but at the same time, it’s a town clearly hurting from a bad economy, and both Lucas and Julia have in common the idea that they both have abusive fathers since, apparently, Lucas’s father has a reputation in part due to his meth habit.
Point is, this is one dark setting. And, for the most part, the movie takes advantage of it. It’s a horror movie, so when people start dying, they don’t die pretty. Lucas is doing what he can for his infected relatives, and Julia has her traumas to live through, even as Paul keeps quiet about his own strained relationship with his sister. And yet, what little we see of Lucas’s father before he got really sick shows a man that, despite his faults, truly loved his children and did what he could to protect them.
Now, when I first heard of Antlers, it was that it was an adaptation of an acclaimed short story with, apparently, a really brutal ending. I haven’t read the short story, but I will say that any concern that this movie would somehow be lacking compared to its source material was a common concern. I don’t know how well this movie stacks up to the short story that inspired it, but on its own, its a fine piece of work.
Grade: B+
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