Main cast: Keri Russell (Julia Meadows), Jesse Plemons (Paul Meadows), Jeremy T Thomas (Lucas Weaver), Graham Greene (Warren Stokes), Scott Haze (Frank Weaver), Rory Cochrane (Dan Lecroy), and Amy Madigan (Ellen Booth)
Director: Scott Cooper

Firstly, a PSA: Antlers has violence and worse inflicted upon children, so folks that are not keen on this may want to avoid this movie or steel themselves first.

There are also scenes with animal carcasses and people getting chewed up as well. Let’s just say that there is a reason why this is classified as a horror film.

So, the plot. Schoolteacher Julia Meadows suspects that a student in her class, Lucas Weaver, is being abused. An abuse survivor herself, the former alcoholic fled her mentally ill father, so she knows the red flags to watch out for: Lucas is withdrawn, underweight to the point of emaciation; he refuses to talk or look into anyone’s eyes, has a habit of being lost in his own mind and drawing images of gruesome monsters and gore, etc.

Meanwhile, her brother Paul, the sheriff of the town of Spirus Falls, has his own problem: part of the body of a local meth lab operator is found in the woods.

Little do the two siblings know: there is something sinister happening in town, and Lucas may be at the center of the whole thing. Ooh, what kind of secrets could the poor boy be hiding?

Before I go on, let me say that Julia is a bit of a wet rag of a protagonist. She left her younger brother behind, in the clutches of an abusive and mentally ill alcoholic, and then comes back later after that father killed himself to move in with Paul. She keeps saying she’d move out, but she never does. Instead, she keeps throwing at Paul’s face that she had a hard life, she had to go for therapy, and it is still very hard for her, wah wah wah… sheesh.

I’d think she would at least understand that Paul didn’t have it easy either, and in fact, Paul is to be commended for getting his life together compared to Julia, who just keeps whining to him about how hard she’s had it in life.

Not that I am saying that she has no reason to be that way. She does. Everything she says and does here seems deliberately calculated to tug at my heart, however, but the end result is often the opposite: I feel bad for her, I do, but I feel at the same time that the script is trying too hard to flog her trauma to the point that she ends up being someone better off seeking more psychiatric help to help her fight her demons. Her actions here tend to make a situation worse or make her come off as someone that really needs more therapy to help her think straight.

A far more genuinely heartbreaking character here is Lucas, who will no doubt be severely traumatized and who knows whether he can ever recover after the events in this movie. The child actor playing him does an excellent job here in making me die inside a little more each time Lucas is on screen. Over the years, I have developed an aversion to even the thought of a child getting hurt, hence there are many scenes here involving him and his brother that left me cringing inside. I won’t be watching this movie again, that’s for sure, and not because it is bad. Far from it, it’s too good at pushing my hot buttons, and I consider that a very good thing for a horror film.

Antlers is a slow boil movie that manages to remain an intriguing edge-of-seat film even when it gives away early what Julia and Paul will take a long time to figure out. This is because the movie is deftly put together. While things move at a slow pace without having anything to hide from the viewer, I find myself watching still because the cast is solid and the way the movie builds up its momentum is great.

Of course, there is also that visceral terror of the possibility that something bad will befall Lucas eventually. As this movie progresses, I find myself slowly retreating away from the screen and deeper into the depths of my sofa, because I am scared for these characters,

Furthermore, the movie has jump scares that are so subtly woven into the skeins of the film, that these scenes are genuinely heart-stopping when they come about. This is something that is hard to find in the current batch of horror offering, so I really appreciate how well this film makes me jump out of my skin.

My biggest complaint about this one is the below average monster effects. I’m not sure what possessed the people behind this movie—ahem—to have that glowing rib cage effect on the monster, but the whole thing looks fake as can be. I actually burst out laughing the first time I see the really fake-looking creature, and that completely ruins whatever feeling of dread I was harboring up to that point. If they had let the monster be, without the really bad Christmas light effect, it’d probably look much more scary.

At any rate, this one does something very few horror films can do these days—make me feel a good degree of dread and fear for the main characters—so Antlers is A-OK with me. I just wish the monster had been more of a monster and less of a cheap Christmas decoration one can find in a garden.