A middle school teacher, Julia, becomes interested in the life and well-being of one of her students. He is harboring a dark secret, one that will lead to terrifying encounters with a legendary ancestral creature.
Antlers is based on Nick Antosca’s short story The Quiet Boy, a story that I truly enjoyed…not to mention that I also find myself intrigued by the mythology surrounding the Wendigo, which this story could be considered a modern take on. Anyway: needless to say, I got a little bit hyped up for this movie…and it was also delayed twice due to Covid-19 (originally it was supposed to be released in April 2020). So, after finally being able to see the movie on the big screen, did it live up to the hype? Well…so far, people’s opinions of it are quite mixed, and I can see why.
First of all, there’s been more than a few changes to the original story. Some of these changes were obviously made to flesh out the teacher character by adding a trauma of her own, with flashbacks and descriptions of how she and her brother grew up in a home of abuse. I guess this was made in order to clarify why she becomes so taken by Lucas, and how she wants to save him from growing up under similar circumstances. The depiction of just how damaged she is, by subtle hints such as her standing in the store looking at the liquor bottles and always forcing herself to not buy one, is a nice touch. Julia’s childhood trauma is defined in a sufficient way without taking up too much of the story and screentime.
Now, since this movie is based on a short story it’s kind of hard to write a review without making comparisons, but I’ll try to keep away from any major spoilers when doing so. In the original story, it’s not revealed until much later why Lucas is living under such conditions, and why he’s doing the things he does. This gives everything a chance to build up with some mystery and suspense. In the movie, however, there’s a very big change: in the very first moments of the movie, we meet Frank (Lucas’s father) who is making meth inside a cave where he and his companion encounters the malevolent spirit, and thus Frank becomes affected. This also changes a major factor in the original story. This does (in my opinion) subtract a bit from the actual horror of the original story, where the movie plays more upon a monster coming to get you, rather than how poverty and desperation can make people bring out the monsters. Oh well…all that aside, the changes in plot doesn’t outright destroy or damage the movie, it’s just a bit different from the original story which, in my opinion, feels both darker and scarier.
As for the killing scenes and the horror of how Frank and Lucas’s brother are transformed into hungry and malevolent beasts, there’s nothing to complain about here. There are close-ups of heavily mutilated corpses and gruesomeness all around. Guillermo del Toro as producer for this movie comes as not much of a surprise, as dark fairytales with monsters is kinda his forté. And in the movie’s final moments, when we get to see the wendigo monster in its fully glory, you can easily see his fingerprints all over the place. It’s one of the movie’s definite highlights.
If you have read the story (which I recommend, despite there being more than a few changes in the movie), you’ll know that this is not a fast-paced horror story. Overall, I think that Antlers doesn’t really match the darkness and horror of the original story, and there are a few instances where it moves along a little too slowly for its own good. However, it delivers grim and gruesome scenes, some very effective and gory ones too. Visually, it looks great, and the wendigo-monster is awesome. So while I prefer how the story unfolds in The Quiet Boy, I still enjoyed how Antlers turned out.
Director: Scott Cooper
Country & year: USA, 2021
Actors: Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, Amy Madigan, Sawyer Jones, Cody Davis, Lyla Marlow, Jesse Downs, Arlo Hajdu, Dorian Kingi, Ken Kramer
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt7740510/
The film opens with Dr. Lucio Fulci sitting in his deep, almost trance-like concentration as he writes down a series of murder scenes for his new, gory horror film. As he groans like Freddy Krueger while he writes, we hear his inner voice describing what to expect for the next 90 minutes:
John Trent used to be a freelance insurance investigator, who is now a patient in a psychiatric hospital. One day, Dr. Wrenn visits him, where Trent recounts his story: after the disappearance of the popular horror novelist Sutter Cane, Trent is having lunch with a colleague. Suddenly, Trent is attacked by an axe-wielding man who is shot dead by the police, and is later revealed to be Cane’s agent. This man went insane after reading one of Cane’s books, and killed his family as a result. And he is not the only one…apparently, some people seem to go crazy after reading Cane’s novels. Shortly afterwards, Trent is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing who wants him to investigate Cane’s disappearance, and also to recover the manuscript for his final novel. Linda Styles, who is Cane’s editor, is assigned to accompany him. While she explains to Trent that Cane’s novels are known to cause paranoia, disorientation and memory loss in some readers, Trent believes it’s all hogwash and considers his disappearance to be a bluff, something done entirely as a publicity stunt. But bizarre phenomena starts happening, and during their investigation, Trent and Linda enters a small town which looks like and includes people that are exactly as described in one of Cane’s fictional novels. Is it all staged, or is something else at play?
Judith Albright suffers a stroke on her 70th birthday, and is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She is moved to a nursing home, a beautiful old-fashioned mansion. While her grandson opposes the move, both Judith and her daughter Barbara insists that this is what will be best for everyone. Judith is a given a room which she shares with another woman. Her roommate is called Annette, but she is nothing but a disturbed, babbling fool who clutches her bible like her life depends on it. Upon staying at the home for a short while, Judith is starting to witness strange behaviour in several of the residents, but doesn’t think much of it, considering that many of the people there are suffering from dementia and are prone to be confused and acting strangely. She befriends a group of other residents whom she starts playing bridge with, and things seem to be rather well…until one evening, when Annette is more disturbed than ever, especially after the cat Ozzie jumps into her bed. That night, Judith wakes up and sees a dark shadow leaning over Annette, and no one believes her about what she’s seen. When Annette dies and Judith also starts seeing that shadow creature in the bedroom, she knows something is very wrong at the nursing home, but of course…no one will believe an old, confused woman…
Enid works as a film censor, and her daily life includes watching some truly brutal and gory movies, choosing what is acceptable for the audience to handle and what should be banned completely. One day she views a movie that makes her believe she can finally solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, and she embarks on a quest that blurs the line between what is real and what is not.
We are in one of the darker corners of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the young man Raymond Everett (Lenny Von Dohlen) owns a horror-themed wax museum. One day he gets some new deliveries, all the way from Romania, one of which is a casket that contains something you’ll never guess what – Vanessa, Dracula’s widow (Sylvia Kristel). Yes, a living, bloodsucking vampire. So why has she gotten herself all the way over to Los Angeles, you may wonder? No one knows. She doesn’t know, the script doesn’t know, even the Man Who Knows poster we see on the wall on Raymond’s apartment, doesn’t know. So where do we go from here? Who knows.
