--Lucas Weaver, Antlers
The artistically incredible Guillermo Del Toro does not direct Antlers, but he does produce this Scott Cooper-directed, slow burn horror tale that continues the trend of recent elevated horror as it mostly transcends jumpscares, shallow characterization, and undeveloped themes. Antlers relies on a dark atmosphere with little that is strictly horror-related until closer to the end, and the buildup focuses on very personal ways that family, abuse, and trauma can intersect. Although Antlers could have done more with its wendigo premise earlier on (the trailers and other promotional material gave the wendigo part away back in 2020 before the film was delayed), it does indeed succeed at reflecting the genuine brokenness that abuse brings as a child and adult with lives shattered by predatory family members live their own lives, interact, and are drawn into a seeming Native American myth. The monsters, at first, are poverty, the emotional suffering that can long outlast abuse, and an air of hopelessness, and it is in this context that the actual creature of the story is revealed.
Production Values
The monster of the film is actually not on the screen very much, which sidesteps the need for a high reliance on either CGI or practical creature effects. Scott Cooper shows consistent restraint, leaving the wendigo almost never fully onscreen until the very end--parts of it like its limbs or antlers are shown otherwise. This leaves the creature more visually mysterious for a longer period in addition to reducing the need for practical or digital effects. The movie could have benefited from the wendigo playing a bigger role between the opening and the climax as well as from the wendigo getting more of an explanation than the single scene of dialogue over it offers, but the wendigo, when directly exposed to the camera, looks rather distinct from other culturally visible examples of wendigos in entertainment (like the ones in the video game Until Dawn).
Human drama is the focus leading up to and during the climax. The two main characters are a young boy named Lucas and his teacher, a woman played by Keri Russell. Keri Russel's Julia is a shining example of a positive teacher character in an entertainment landscape that tends to get more out of negative teacher characters--though both are needed, of course. Russel lets viewers see how the abuse of Julia's childhood has reshaped her life with everything from her conflicted glances at alcohol in a store to her clever way of getting Lucas to open up after buying him ice cream. Lucas himself is portrayed by Jeremy T. Thomas in a child performance that is at least on par with those of It: Chapter One.
Jesse Plemons (Judas and the Black Messiah) might not be as central a character as Julia and Lucas, but, playing Julia's brother, he delivers the solemnity of a traumatized abuse victim well, especially in one particular scene with him and Keri Russell. Despite his smaller role, he, Russel, and Thomas are the key intersection of the themes of Antlers and its characters. It is unfortunate that Graham Greene, the Native American actor who plays a character familiar with Algonquin stories, does not have a larger role in a movie about an Algonquin cryptid, but at least his grim delivery and description of wendigos is not given in vain.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A mysterious entity attacks two men in a mine, one of which is revealed to have gone back to his home and children only to succumb to a strange condition, reduced to a state of ravenous hunger and aggression. His son Lucas draws the attention of his teacher Julia when she recognizes signs of possible abuse at home, recalling her own abuse at the hands of the father. Lucas brings his own father fresh meat as the latter behaves more and more like a non-human animal, eventually sprouting antlers and shedding his human form for a much more foreign body.
Intellectual Content
In the background of Antlers, there is a cautionary tale about exploitation of the physical world, something mentioned at the beginning when it is said that the wendigo is unleashed as a reaction to humanity's gratuitous plundering of nature. However, this is not developed very much after the opening scene, as abuse and the potentially complicated nature of family are given almost all of the focus after this point. The two main characters Julia and Lucas are examined as they grapple with different kinds of harmful family dynamics, which is made more nuanced with the fact that Lucas's father is not even dangerous to him until the wendigo inhabits his body. It is actually Julia's brother, although he is a comparatively secondary character, who helps communicate specific truths about abuse. We see Julia have a flashback to the sexual abuse her father inflicted on her, but nothing is shown and little is said of her brother's past, leading to a moment where she speaks to him as if her abuse from their father was worse than his.
"You have no idea what he did to me," he tells Julia. With this single line, Julia's brother conveys the piercing truth that not every person who does not speak of facing past abuse has gone through life without actually facing it. Moreover, the circumstance of this character being a brother instead of a sister helps normalize recognizing male victims of abuse in cinema as not necessarily having been abused less just just because they are male. There is also the more nuanced portrayal of Lucas's father not being abusive or neglectful until the wendigo possesses him: even after he is first possessed by the ravenous spirit, he actually sets up multiple locks on his door to separate himself from his children, something that a malicious parent would not do. More could have come from some of these themes and plot points, but Antlers takes abuse very seriously while still managing to depict the shared, fractured humanity in victims and abusers alike.
Conclusion
Like Hereditary, The Witch, The Monster, and other such excellent horror films of recent years that focus on the ways a family can collapse, Antlers does not hesitate to show the grief and danger that family can be the source of. It really is more of a character story than a horror tale about a wendigo, but that is not necessarily a problem for a movie like this. Just do not expect any of the comedy that has even become standard in horror, for there is not so much as a smile or joke to be found in any scene that I can think of. Antlers does not try to water down the gravity of its subject matter. In a film market flooded with both clever and unneeded attempts at humor, this film has the chance to stand out all the more.
Content:
1. Violence: A handful of characters are killed by a wendigo onscreen or offscreen. In one case, a man possessed by the wendigo spirit bites a living person shortly before antlers emerge from his throat. His corpse is found burst open later on.
2. Profanity: Occasionally, words like "shit" are used.
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