Movie Review: Antlers (2021)

Synopsis: After moving back to her childhood home in Oregon, teacher Julia Meadows becomes increasingly concerned about Lucas, one of her students, because she believes he is being abused by his father. What she doesn't know is Lucas is hiding a terrifying supernatural secret about his family.

Who's in it? The movie stars Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene and Scott Haze.


 

Review: I didn't plan on checking out another movie from our library last week but, remembering my wife and I each had a 3-day weekend, changed my mind and picked out one from the new release section. To be honest, this movie didn't really win me over from the description but, figuring it would at least give us a few jump scares, I picked it anyway. As it turns out, I should have just left it on the shelf.

To be fair, the premise of the movie wasn't a horrible one and, at minimum, it did have a halfway decent mystery about what happened to Lucas' (Thomas) family. I'll even be willing to admit some of the scenes were somewhat suspenseful, though I did feel the victims kind of had it coming at times, especially when they were entering homes without permission.

The main problem with this movie, in my opinion, is overall execution. The film spends way too much time building up to the main part of the story and, because of that, my wife and I had to spend an awful lot of energy trying to fight off the boredom. By the time the movie started to finally get exciting, we honestly had lost interest and, frankly, there was nothing about this movie that really set it apart from dozens of films just like it.

Ironically, I actually think this movie would have been considerably better had it not been a supernatural horror film and, instead, been a regular drama about a teacher trying to prove one of her students is being abused. I honestly found the backstory about the town, and the way many kids were homeschooled to prevent meth labs from being discovered, much more interesting than the monster story and feel that would have made a much better premise. It's just too bad the writers completely missed that.

Final Opinion: I watched three movies from the library this past weekend. Two were surprisingly good. This one was surprisingly dull. I would not recommend it.

My Grade: D

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