Antlers

There is a scene near the begin­ning of Antlers where Miss Julia Mead­ows (Keri Rus­sell), recent­ly returned to her child­hood home in small-town Ore­gon, teach­es a junior school class on myths and fables. ​“Sto­ry­telling”, she says, ​“is a way for peo­ple to explain their world, their cul­ture”, and she express­ly cites the nar­ra­tive tra­di­tions of the local Native Amer­i­can population.

When pressed, one of her qui­eter pupils, Lucas Weaver (Jere­my T Thomas) recites a vari­ant on the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale (sans the blonde hero­ine). Being a recov­er­ing vic­tim of child abuse, Julia imme­di­ate­ly recog­nis­es in this skin­ny, scrap­py young boy’s words an oblique alle­go­ry of his own dys­func­tion­al domes­tic sit­u­a­tion. So, hop­ing to res­cue her­self as much as Lucas, Julia begins sur­rep­ti­tious­ly look­ing into Lucas’ home life, not real­is­ing that his sto­ry was explain­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of hor­ror, root­ed in local legend.

At the cen­tre of Antlers is gap­ing hunger, both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal. You can see it in the way that Julia eyes the liquor bot­tles in the local store, or that Lucas peers into the win­dow of an ice cream shop, or in the rav­en­ous aching of Lucas’ meth-cook­ing father (Scott Haze) and younger broth­er Aiden (Sawyer Jones), or more fig­u­ra­tive­ly in the des­per­ate yearn­ing of Julia’s broth­er Paul (Jesse Ple­mons) to be a fam­i­ly again. This insa­tiable need (and greed) is fig­ured more broad­ly in the mine that is one of the film’s key loca­tions, leav­ing ugly marks dug into its beau­ti­ful sea­side set­ting, and due, against all envi­ron­men­tal advice, to be reopened.

There may be a mon­ster in this crea­ture fea­ture, but in a way it is mere­ly the myth­ic embod­i­ment of all these strug­gles to find sat­is­fac­tion and fill a bot­tom­less void of long­ing. The human char­ac­ters here, both con­sumers and feed­ers, all have their own mon­strous­ness, and the more you try to psy­chol­o­gise the bes­tial events hap­pen­ing on screen, the more dis­turb­ing the film becomes. The horned enti­ty may leave corpses marred by abom­inable trau­ma, but the liv­ing too, like their dam­aged envi­ron­ment, already come deeply scarred.

There is not just a shape-shifter on the loose in Antlers, but also a pro­tean kind of sto­ry­telling: Lucas’ tale (open to more than one inter­pre­ta­tion) of mean, starv­ing bears who still at least ​“had each oth­er”; tales of deprav­i­ties hid­den behind closed doors; local lore about the ever-starv­ing wendi­go; and Nick Antosca’s short sto­ry ​‘The Qui­et Boy’, here very freely adapt­ed and copi­ous­ly expand­ed by Antosca and co-writ­ers Hen­ry Chais­son and direc­tor Scott Cooper.

These myths are indeed made to accom­mo­date the oth­er­wise unspeak­able hor­rors of domes­tic depri­va­tion and abuse, eco­log­i­cal pre­da­tion and colo­nial injus­tice and exploita­tion. 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.