The first "Horror Fest" was the premiere of Guillermo del Toro's production project, in which Native American mythology coexists with the complexes of modern Americans.
A few years after fleeing from her mentally ill father, Julia (Keri Russell) returns to her small homeland, to a provincial town somewhere in Oregon: the torturer relative has already died, the place itself has turned into one big drug den, and his brother (Jesse Plemons), whose the girl left to deal with the problems, every now and then she drills her sister with an offended look. At the school where she got a job, Julia meets a strange kid, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), who by all indications suffers from domestic violence and bullying. However, the boy is worried not only about the ridicule of his classmates and conflicts with his parents: in the attic of the house, under several locks, he keeps his father and younger brother, suffering from a terrible illness and striving to break free every night.
Produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Scott Cooper, "Antlers", it seems, by default, could not ignore the dark underside of America and ancient myths rooted in the dark caves and forests of Oregon. The first one is a big fan of turning genre stories into capacious allusions, social statements about racism, intolerance and otherness; the second is an artist of simple but repulsive images, a researcher of chthony and the most unattractive pages in US history. You don't even need to guess what the picture will be about - it is much more interesting whether the concern of two authors (in general, different in style, but similar ideologically) can turn into something other than another topical poster
The very chton that Cooper admired in "Foes" and "Black Mass", the director here manages to capture even more spectacularly than before. A drug-addicted town, radio reports of the opioid crisis and poverty, bodies torn to shreds in the woods, and in the scope of the lens is a skinny and dirty boy trying to keep distraught relatives in the attic of his squalid shack. America, stuck for a long time in a giant existential hole, here becomes the same hero as, say, Julia and her brother - the province lives (or, rather, suffocates) in a common rhythm, becoming a single monstrous organism. It would be scary if it weren't so beautiful: for cameraman Florian Hoffmeister, who previously directed the outstanding horror series Terror, every shot reminds of a gloomy indie from Sundance, where visual poetry spreads all over the screen.
Things are worse when Cooper gets to verbal rhymes. "Antlers" want to seem more important than they are: they constantly emphasize their mythology (in the lesson Julia gives an excursion into the connection of fairy tales with real life), speculate on psychotherapy (almost every hero has similar childhood traumas, which are revealed through a plot about with wendigo), and in each scene they escalate the drama through an annoying instrumental melody. Horror is a manipulative genre in and of itself, building relationships with the viewer as strong, but in "Antlers" all the magic comes down to a couple of daddy-issues and reflections on the agony of one-story America. Cooper, who has worked in several formats throughout his career - from an Oscar-winning musical biopic to a crime thriller - treats familiar elements not as an artist, but as a plumber who came to patch up pipes and tighten a couple of nuts.
Technical excellence collides with the author's platitude, visual storytelling with a polished studio script. A more inhuman film about human problems still needs to be looked for. The aesthetics of a dirty province is exactly what is stitched together with Indian mythology - the complexes of modern Americans, of course, not only from problem families and a collapsed economy, but also because of the transcendental forest spirits of the indigenous people, who, surprisingly, were also awarded a couple of injuries by the European conquerors. Violence breeds violence, hatred leads to hatred, but so what? Cooper, it seems, jabbed the truisms so clearly on the set of Foes that he still sees the truth in them alone.
This article was sponsored by Kristin Fitzgerald
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