Antlers: Sometimes The Monsters Are Real

 “We pray for the children…

… who never get dessert,

who watch their parents watch them die,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind,

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have any rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.”

                         - Ina J. Hughes, Prayer For The Children

Scary movies are often intended as allegories, addressing real-life monstrosities through mythical monsters. From something as intimate as grief to as sweeping as war, fictional monsters let us safely explore things that might hit a little too close to home otherwise. Of course, it seems like in the last few years the commingling of real and fictional monsters has become the province of “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or “what people who’ve been looking down their noses at horror all this time came up with when they ran across films well-made enough that they couldn’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Okay, that got away from me. And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve effused about good films that examine real and fictional horrors in parallel. The point is that Antlers is another film in that tradition, a grim and somber story about natural and supernatural monstrosity. It stumbles at the finish line somewhat, but for most of its running time it’s pretty compelling.

Not that you’d know it from the opening title card, a bit about how mankind has pillaged the earth and awoken a malevolent spirit. It’s ham-fisted and totally unnecessary. But once we’re past that, there’s a little boy, playing in what appears to be the wreckage of an abandoned work site. He’s passing the time while his father takes care of some business, and soon enough makes his way back to the pickup truck. His dad cautions him about wandering off alone and tells him they’re almost finished. And so dad heads back into what turns out to be an abandoned mine, he and his brother wearing respirators as they clear out beakers, blowtorches, empty cold medicine boxes, all the hallmarks of bathtub chemistry of a certain type. But then there’s a noise, coming from further down the tunnel. It sounds like some kind of wild animal. We don’t get to see what it is, but it gets at them, badly.

We cut to the boy still waiting in the truck. And waiting, and waiting.

This film is basically the story of Cispus Falls, Oregon, a small town in the perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest. It’s a town the color of a bruise, a town where the mining company packed up and left, taking all the jobs with them, leaving the people to fend for themselves. It’s a place where it seems like almost everyone does everything with a sense of weary resignation and doesn’t aspire to much more than getting by. Julia Meadows is a recent arrival, teaching at the one school in town. She grew up here, had a really hard life here, ran and didn’t look back. Except now some unspecified setbacks in California have brought her right back. She’s living with her brother - the town’s sheriff - and it seems to be a fraught, cautious relationship. They spend a lot of time tiptoeing around what happened when they were kids. Until they don’t. Julia’s frustrated that she can’t get the kids to engage with her - she knows their situation, and it’s the knowing that frustrates her. She knows how badly they need some ray of light. There’s one kid who especially concerns here - Lucas. Keeps showing up in the same clothes, has trouble focusing, gets bullied a lot. He draws really unsettling picture of monsters in the dark.

He's the kid from the truck in the beginning.

So it’s the story of land poisoned by mining and a dying town poisoned by despair. Both give birth to horrible things. Cispus Falls is a bleak place - drug labs in abandoned mining tunnels, another eviction or foreclosure every week, all the things that go on behind closed doors, parents who homeschool their children so they can mule drugs or so the teachers don’t smell the meth on their clothes from their parents. Malnutrition, poverty, abuse of every type, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s a town with a lot of pain, and that pain’s been taken out on its children, as it was taken out on their parents, as it was taken out on their grandparents, and so on. It’s a place that was broken long ago. There’s no shortage of real monsters here. And sometimes our real-world monstrosities coalesce into otherworldly ones, as if the earth itself came alive to protest our abuses. In that respect, the town is well-realized as a character in and of itself. Even the sunny days here feel drained of anything good. 

This is complemented by a largely understated approach to the narrative - wordless looks and terse flashbacks do a lot of storytelling here, and though the gaps aren’t hard to fill in, it’s a film that mostly trusts its audience. I say mostly, because there is the occasional bit of exposition-y dialogue (and some bigger problems around this toward the end), but for the most part it’s a story told carefully and deliberately, a bit at a time, without a lot of histrionics or hysterics. This restraint extends to a score that is mostly ambient, just there enough to color the scene, and a palette primarily consisting of muddy grays and browns, with the occasional cold fluorescent light of a corner market, and a lot of desaturation in the color. There’s occasional sunshine, but not for very long, and the even more occasional breathtaking panorama of forest or mountains to break up the sad squalor of this town the mining company forgot. It’s inhabited by characters who are largely believable, though some of them get developed more than others, and though none of them feel like sketches, some people do feel like they’re in and out of the story a little more quickly than is ideal. Even if the dialogue is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, the relationships and dynamics between people feel real.

This pervasive foreboding is helped along by thoughtful pacing as well. The first two acts are mostly subdued table-setting with just enough peeks into what’s happening to build a sense of dread without giving the entire game away at first. Something bad is going on here but it isn’t immediately clear what, and not everything is exactly what it seems to be. There’s some explicit violence, but more often we’re just witness to its aftermath, the horrible wreckage of what were once human bodies, depicted dispassionately. Quick images and little details build things up leading into the third act, where all the monsters become real - and here, the effects work (always the toughest proposition for a film like this) holds up quite well. That said, the move toward more action means that some of the atmosphere is lost. Although it never stops being evocative visually, with rainy days exchanged for foggy moonlit nights and mine interiors lit only by stark red flares, it does lose some of the mood so carefully built up in favor or something more disappointingly obvious. 

And this shift toward the more obvious is why I don’t think it quite sticks the landing either, with a climax that’s a little too obvious and an “the end…or is it?” ending that feels entirely unnecessary, given how strongly this film relies on ideas of generational trauma and the nature and consequences of abuse. The obviousness of the opening title card about what mankind has done to the earth infects the ending as well. So not a slam dunk, but there’s a lot to recommend it nonetheless.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon