Antlers (2021)

Scott Cooper's Antlers arrives as a creature feature wearing the heavy coat of an allegory. Keri Russell plays Julia Meadows, a schoolteacher returning to a small Oregon town, and the film devotes itself to her suspicions about a quiet student who is feeding something in his attic. The horror machinery is competent. The practical effects are wet and unpleasant in the correct ways, and the whole production carries the grim, sodden atmosphere of a Pacific Northwest winter. It is a serious film about serious things, which is exactly where the trouble starts.

On the matter of cultural consciousness, this is a curious specimen. It reaches for the Algonquin wendigo myth and hands the exposition to Graham Greene, who explains the rules and then vanishes, a piece of narrative plumbing with a face attached. Native performers appear in the cast, and the setting is a rural town of meth labs and shuttered mines, yet the film shows no interest in what any of that means. Poverty is texture. The myth is a monster manual. Julia sits at the center of the story, though the screenplay never converts her into an argument. There is no patriarchy to dismantle, no romantic subplot for her to transcend, just a woman doing her job in a cold climate.

What the film does possess is a surplus of sermonizing about trauma. Every scene gestures at abuse, addiction, and inherited pain, and the creature is plainly meant to be read as the thing that gets handed down. The allegory is not subtle, and the reviewers who called the whole affair a monologue were not wrong. Nothing here concerns itself with the body as a site of affirmation, with the climate, with queerness, or with neurodivergence. It is a well-shot, well-acted, humorless film that mistakes its own gravity for depth. We file it accordingly.