Movie Review: 'Antlers' Starring Keri Russell

Antlers stars Keri Russell as Julia Meadows, a troubled young teacher who has moved back to her home state in Oregon to get back on her feet. Living with her younger brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), now a county sheriff, and back in their childhood home where she survived years of abuse from their father, Julia is just doing her best to stay clean and sober amid the many triggers of her past trauma. Her main focus is teaching where she has come to know a troubled little boy whom she sees some of herself in.

The little boy is Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T Thomas) and he is, indeed, quite troubled. After school we see Lucas walk alone in a desolate part of the Pacific ocean shore. Lucas sees a skunk and sets about trapping and killing it. Why? We find out right away. In a story that precedes the introduction of our main characters we see Lucas’ father, Frank making methamphetamine in an abandoned mine shaft.

A mysterious growling noise draws Frank and his partner deeper into the shaft where they see strange leather bags hanging from the ceiling. Soon, the creature making the strange noise emerges and attacks in a brutal fashion which we hear but don’t fully see. Outside the mine shaft, Frank’s youngest son is waiting for him but when dad doesn’t respond to his calls, he enters the shaft and we jump to the opening credits.

The skunk is not Lucas's dinner but it is someone's dinner, someone who is locked in the attic of Lucas' home, someone he trying to care for despite being only 9 or 10 years old. As with most things in Antlers, the child's life is brilliantly shone. Cooper creates a plausible, horrifyingly sad reality for Lucas, one that would undoubtedly ring deeply with Russell's Julia.

The mine shaft scene is an effective start to a monster movie and director Scott Cooper is an incredibly smart director. Throughout the runtime of Antlers he keeps us on edge with smart choices and a visual style that engenders a deep dread. The gray atmosphere of the northwest and this particularly scarred area, covered in the detritus of lost industry, adds a creeping rot to every exterior in Antlers.

The visual style is also an all too perfect underline to the story of abuse and trauma at the heart of Antlers that, unfortunately never gels with the monster movie aspect. There is a deep disconnect between the monster movie and the movie about trauma and addiction. The monster movie stuff when it does connect is incredibly on the nose about the way drugs take people you know and transform them into monsters you no longer recognize.

Keri Russell is a wonderful actress and you can see what she is playing for here but the monster movie almost seems in the way of her movie about seeing her own traumatic childhood in the eyes of one of the children she teaches. That story is more interesting than the monster movie which is mostly a horror movie of a more traditional kind. Several scenes between Russell and Jesse Plemons are so good that they belong in a movie that doesn’t have a monster in it.

I can sense an idea to use the monster legend to try and update a story about addiction and trauma but it just never worked for me. I appreciated the remarkable look of Antlers, the degraded small town ravaged by drugs and the loss of industry, how the trajectory of the town matches the growing wounds of those who live there, that’s good stuff. But the monster movie is a different, pretty good but mismatched element of Antlers.

The monster is based on the Native American legend of the Wendigo and Graham Greene, that reliable face of Native American wisdom is on hand as the former sheriff who advises Plemons’ new sheriff. But, despite the legend being a specifically Native American legend, there is little more than passing glances at how Native Americans play into this story.

Essentially, the ceaseless hunger and greed of the Wendigo possesses the soul of a human being. It’s not hard to assume that Greene is standing in for the millions of Native Americans who’ve been consumed by the greedy expansion of the White man for decades but that’s a bit of a leap and, again, a very on the nose assessment.

Scott Cooper is an excellent director but I am not certain what draws him to this story. It’s two distinct stories in play and he’s great at both of them, the monster movie and the childhood trauma, drugs and abuse story. In the end however, these stories fail to coalesce and Antlers is left as less than the sum of its parts, a solid effort in many ways but deeply dissatisfying as a whole.

Antlers opened in theaters on Friday, October 29th, 2021.