Antlers
2021
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Highly underrated and obscured. Weapons meets Cobweb in this folk horror out of a indigenous creature myth that gives a brutal lesson on child abuse and how it perpetuates a culture of generational bullies and potential abusers down the line. Like a cursed disease waiting to flare up. This one also has Amy Madigan. Remarkably shot by Scott Cooper with the help of a moody atmosphere in a town which looks like it's on its deathbed, Antlers makes some bewildering choices during the final stage that can only be explained as misfire after misfire and many of those choices don't even make any sense. The climax was a bit too rosy and fairytale-like sort of too Pollyanna about the whole good's triumph over evil, or so I thought. Overall it was a really disturbing, really sinister take of a town where the elders have been too hung up on their own issues and the authorities have given up on the whole village because nature has refused to cater to the endless needy pit of human species letting darkness and despair to take nature's place, gloom under its grasp. Even if not for the plot, Antlers should be watched just for its photography, lights, color and background score. This is a definitive watch for the fans of The Ritual, Weapons, The Outsider, No One Gets Out Alive etc, Enthusiasts of cosmic horror, folk horror, creature feature, the occult and grimoire and Admirers of Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft, Arthur Manchen, Adam Nevill and even Stephen King