phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2022

Antlers



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 39m
Country: Mexico, USA
Language: English, Ojibwa
Genre Tags: Drama, Horror, Mystery
Plot Summary: In an isolated Oregon town, a middle-school teacher and her sheriff brother become embroiled with her enigmatic student, whose dark secrets lead to terrifying encounters with an ancestral creature.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Dark, emotional horror, more about the traumatic metaphors than the literal monster. Low key creepy mood throughout until the finale, which is not a complaint at all. It may not be full of gore and jump scares, but it's a well-crafted piece of character-driven horror.


Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

"Antlers" is a film about darkness. Human darkness. Supernatural darkness. Literal, low-lit filmmaking darkness. It is a slimy, icky, violent film that doesn't always come together but it also undeniably feels like it has emerged from the passions of its creators, particularly director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo del Toro. Like other works of the former, it centers people on the economic fringe who carry heavy emotional weights. Like other works of the latter, it imagines a world wherein real pain can open doors to unimaginable horror. (One can also easily trace some of the themes of previous work by co-writer Nick Antosca to this project as well, for all you "Channel Zero" fans.) Trauma, grief, abuse, addiction—these are not new themes to the genre and those quick to write off the trend of "elevated horror" will find plenty to criticize here, but they'd also be writing off this film's impressive craft, committed ensemble, and notable ambition. "Antlers" may fall short of its potential, but I suspect it will find a fan base over the years.


A.A. Dowd
Grade: B- - Antlers drowns a good monster movie in dour metaphor

There's little quibbling with the craft. Antlers has a strong sense of place: a good feel for the bone-deep melancholy of this woodsy, rainy outpost of meth country. Its images can be striking and memorable; there's a great, late overhead shot, for example, of a car cutting a faint line of illumination through blackest night, ballasted on both sides of the road by an ocean of foreboding foliage. And the actors are almost touchingly committed to the emotional stakes of the material: Russell and Plemons, both very good, tackle the script's overfamiliar kitchen-sink drama as though they were pioneers in uncharted territory, admirably oblivious to the dozens of hardscrabble indies that have walked this path of grim familial reckoning before.