The Fable of Modern Industrial Ruin

Scott Cooper (director), Antlers

An idealistic schoolteacher returns to her Oregon hometown, a move more optimistic than smart, given the trauma baked into the landscape. One of Julia’s middle-school students is a talented artist and storyteller, but his stories are dark, and his drawings are in shades of blood red. Julia projects her childhood abuse onto young Lucas, and makes him her personal project, perhaps seeking her own redemption. But things are secretly far, far worse.

Writer-director Scott Cooper’s latest, which languished in post-production for two years, isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. He populates his economically bereft mountainous setting with characters who would’ve been better served by a character drama. Its Native American-inspired horror makes for engaging allegory, without being particularly scary. Cooper’s heart was clearly in the right place, but watching this movie, his storyboard apparently wasn’t.

Young Lucas Weaver retreats from bullies, studies his lap during class, and hurries home every afternoon. The local sheriff acknowledges the apparent open secret: Lucas’ junkie father operates a meth lab, which everyone quietly tolerates. Except, his father Frank hasn’t been seen outside in weeks. We, the audience, see what locals never see: Lucas keeps his father and younger brother locked in the attic, dopesick and howling impotently.

Julia Meadows left Oregon when she turned eighteen, but has returned, for reasons never explained. She shares her childhood home with her brother Paul, who became sheriff largely because nobody else wanted the job. She hates the house, though; every shadow contains traces of childhood abuse, which is never specified, but clearly sexual. (If Julia and Paul didn’t explicitly declare themselves siblings, you’d assume something closer. Call it trauma bonding.)

Therein lies an important problem with this movie: Julia’s lingering unresolved trauma gets explored in some detail, causing audiences to feel strongly for her, but beyond this exploration, nothing comes of it. Her flashbacks maybe justify her disproportionate investment in trying to understand and protect Lucas. But the trauma serves the movie’s themes, not its story, and Julia never clearly indicates whether she’s achieved anything by revisiting old wounds.

The real story is Lucas and his family. Lucas is smart, sensitive, and artistic, a fish-out-of-water in his blue-collar hometown. His junkie father has become an eating machine, diseased by years of using substances to dull the pain, and Lucas feeds him by throwing roadkill and wild-caught game into the attic where Dad lives. Now Lucas’ little brother Aiden also shows signs of the family disease, and Lucas risks having to watch the cycle repeat.

Jeremy T. Thomas as Lucas and Keri Russell as Julia in Antlers

This allegory of rural anomie and generational anguish should’ve been the entire movie. Julia might make an engaging protagonist in a Bergman-style drama about someone trying, and failing, to overcome her personal demons, but in this movie, she feels like a supporting character who received way too much screen time. Because Julia fails to achieve closure, or at least progress, she leaves us frustrated. Lucas carries the real story.

Lucas’ painful myth unfolds against an atmospheric background. In several shots, the Oregon landscape dominates the characters. One chain-link fence might separate virgin forest from roads once paved but now abandoned, a labyrinth of ruts and cracks. Lucas, walking home, is dwarfed beside a clear-running stream, and the mountains beyond. Every shot is dreary and overcast; never once does the screen picture include enough sunlight to cast a shadow.

I’m reluctant to say what comes next, but it needs said: Scott Cooper, and maybe Nick Antosca’s short story which inspired Cooper’s movie, shouldn’t have used Native American mythology. An introductory title card includes narration spoken in Ojibwe, and the monster, once revealed, comes from Algonquin legend. These nations are nowhere near Oregon, which Cooper presumably chose for its evocative landscape shots. There is no pan-Native culture or religion.

Cooper has, sadly, conscripted Native American fable into telling a story of White spiritual dislocation. That’s frequently an effective technique, because White American culture has long recognized that Natives have a connection with land, medicine, and spirit that colonists lack. But getting the details right matters; transplanting a Great Lakes myth into Oregon shows ignorance of both Algonquin religion and Oregon.

I enjoyed plenty about this movie, particularly the way Lucas attempts to appease the father who increasingly becomes monstrous. (“I’ll feed him,” Lucas whispers with eyes wide, “and he’ll love me.”) But that could’ve been accomplished, probably in more depth, if the movie had jettisoned the unnecessary grown-up characters and misplaced Indigenous myth. This movie’s heart got lost in the bells and whistles.