Antlers (2021)

Thoroughly successful both as icky art house horror and as an allegory of generational trauma, Scott Cooper’s Antlers continues the director’s hot streak while bearing the unmistakable mark of one of its producers, Guillermo del Toro.

What makes suggestion-driven Antlers so disturbing isn’t the movie’s tension- and dread-building mechanics so much as the way the filmmaker burrows into the minds of his two main characters.

Antlers is a slippery, troubling film whose ambiguities, despite one heavy-handed piece of exposition, remain intact even as the film’s identity keeps metamorphosing and body-swapping. Here, the beast within has always been there, lurking and latent as part of America’s constitution, and just waiting to bite back.

Committed performances by Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons and extraordinary young actor Jeremy T. Thomas vividly communicate the deeper emotional stakes of Antlers, if somewhat unfortunately without adding an ounce of fun or excitement to its mythmaking.

Antlers is a very effective, chilling film. It doesn’t have the franchise flash of Halloween Kills or the bizarro artifice of Lamb, but there’s authenticity to this movie that’s so effective and, at times, emotionally overwhelming