A ponderous yet mostly empty creature feature from Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper confuses grimness for substance
Is Antlers, a grisly shift into body horror for the Crazy Heart and Hostiles director Scott Cooper, really about the curse of generational trauma and familial abuse? Or is it really about the grim consequences faced by a society that callously disavows the disadvantaged, allowing those on the breadline to suffer in silence? Or is it really about how white Americans should pay the price for stealing and then abusing land and culture that belongs to indigenous communities? Or is it really actually ultimately about nothing at all? Is it just another posturing post-Babadook/Hereditary/Get Out attempt to “elevate” the horror genre (a genre that doesn’t always need to be “elevated” thank you very much), too schlocky for the arthouse lot and too dull for the Halloween crowd?
If only those involved with making Antlers had any clue themselves, perhaps that would make for a more cohesive and less maddening experience but the film, produced by Guillermo del Toro, is a shapeless blancmange of extreme gore and ponderous soap, uneasily trying to do so much more than it’s capable of. There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.