Antlers drowns a good monster movie in dour metaphor

There’s a pretty good monster movie lurking somewhere beneath the oppressively depressive skin of Scott Cooper’s Antlers. It peeks its head out here and there—just like the monster itself, a hoofed ancestral beast the film catches only in quick glimpses, in what you could call a variation on the classic Jaws tact of getting more from less. The trouble here is endemic to the present age of creature feature: Everyone involved wants the monster to be more than a monster. Once upon a time, there was subtext in these films. It has since been swallowed whole by fearsome oversized metaphors.

Antlers can’t even settle on a single metaphor. You almost have to feel bad for its deerlike main attraction, forced to shoulder the burden of multiple ills, like an all-purpose Smokey The Bear of humanity’s biggest boners. At first, the movie seems to be sticking to folkloric interpretation, the scroll of an epigraph whispering of Mother Nature’s nastier offspring. The camera glides over a body of water in scenic Oregon, landing on a line of billowing factories looming within the surrounding woods. When something snarling and unseen drops a pair of workers in this post-industrial corner of the Pacific Northwest, we have to wonder if the gnashing thing is attacking on behalf of the environment rather than its own bottomless appetite.

The movie has other ideas, enough to stock a social-issues film festival. Maybe the real monster is economic depression. Or maybe it’s the opioid crisis. Both cast a shadow over Cooper’s colorless small-town setting. They are related problems, of course—all part of the tapestry of America’s failures. They converge in the home of a young boy, Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), with dark circles under his eyes and dark events weighing on his heart. Behind a locked door, his father (Scott Haze) growls and wails, sickness in his blood. Lucas’ brother is with him, shifting the film’s theme again.

His teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), can see the evidence of Troubles At Home. She’s back in her hellishly depleted hometown after an eternity away, crashing with her lawman brother, Paul (Jesse Plemons), following the death of their father. Based on a short story by Nick Antosca, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cooper and Henry Chaisson, Antlers doles out the backstory of these estranged siblings in bits and pieces. Suffice to say, Julia knows all too well about the way children of abusive households instinctively protect the secret of their parents’ mistakes. And in Lucas, she sees both a mirror of her own traumatic history and a belated opportunity for redemption—a Clarice Starling quest to quiet the lambs screaming in her dreams.

Cooper, maker of stately Hollywood dramas with masculinity on the mind and offhand moments of disarming sensitivity, is the working definition of a jack of all trades. Here, he dabbles handsomely in horror—a genre he’s flirted with before, turning Johnny Depp into an almost vampiric gangster in Black Mass and Woody Harrelson into a frighteningly barbaric figure of human evil in Out Of The Furnace, which was set in a different smoggy, desperate stretch of dead-end America. Cooper’s approach this time is to drown just about every frame of his movie in despair. Antlers sustains a note of unyielding moroseness through its muted palette and melancholic strings. It’s rare to see a monster movie, or a big-studio movie, this relentlessly dour.

There’s little quibbling with the craft. Antlers has a strong sense of place: a good feel for the bone-deep melancholy of this woodsy, rainy outpost of meth country. Its images can be striking and memorable; there’s a great, late overhead shot, for example, of a car cutting a faint line of illumination through blackest night, ballasted on both sides of the road by an ocean of foreboding foliage. And the actors are almost touchingly committed to the emotional stakes of the material: Russell and Plemons, both very good, tackle the script’s overfamiliar kitchen-sink drama as though they were pioneers in uncharted territory, admirably oblivious to the dozens of hardscrabble indies that have walked this path of grim familial reckoning before.

No expense was spared, either, on the Ray Harryhausen side of the equation. Among the producers is Guillermo del Toro, and you can see his devilish influence whenever this monster movie is stooping to the lowly business of acting like one. The violence is surprisingly grisly for such a high-minded affair; Cooper does not skimp on the gore. And what we do see of the creature is pretty cool—the latest argument for putting guys in latex again instead of summoning toothy, headlining horrors from the digital gene pool.

Yet the film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best. All the studiously researched Native American folklore—packaged in a single expository info dump, finely delivered by ace character actor Graham Greene—keeps bumping up against its underlying thoughts about addiction, poverty, and cycles of violence. The impression is of an awkward attempt to cram the square peg of an abuse story into the round hole of respectfully reproduced mythology. What does this monster represent anyway? It can’t be everything. And by the murky messaging of the climax, you have to wonder if maybe nothing would have been preferable.