ANTLERS (October 2021)

  

ANTLERS

(October 2021)

“Yeah, he said he was, uhh, hiking up near Greymouth, when a stench led him to a man half buried in the woods. I guess the other half was found in the mine, near a meth lab. Was probably a, a bear or a cougar, something.”

“Jesus.”

“From what he just told me, I don’t think Jesus was anywhere to be found.”

Guilt-ridden Julia Meadows (Keri Russell) finds herself back in her hometown of Cispus Falls, Oregon, still trying to “resolve” her lifetime of “issues” (which reveal themselves gradually during the first act, proving her own terms blatant understatements).

It’s a place she admits she barely recognizes anymore, an economically depressed mining town, in the midst of a so-called “war on American energy.”

But, given that this is a horror movie co-produced by no less than Guillermo del Toro*, it should come as no surprise that there are even darker (and bloodier) things afoot.

“Daddy said God is dead.”

Director Scott Cooper (working from a screenplay credited to C. Henry Chaisson, Nick Antosca, and Cooper, based on Antosca’s short story, “The Quiet Boy”) gives us a horror film that isn’t just about literal, supernatural monsters, but also the kinds of monsters that lurk behind the unassuming masks of men.

While the “Creature”** is, naturally, the main attraction, Antlers is also about generational trauma, and the tragic and grotesque scars left behind by abuse.

It’s about “the lost, the frail, and the depraved”.

“I just have to feed him, and he’ll love me.”

There’s also an interesting supporting cast here, with the likes of Jesse Plemons (as Julia’s brother, Paul, who also happens to be Cispus Falls’ Sheriff), Amy Madigan, Graham Greene, and Rory Cochrane.

Sadly, three of the above mentioned are relegated to either Exposition Delivery, or those sad, thankless horror movie roles that ultimately underutilize the actor.

You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Still, Antlers is most definitely worth a look.

I came to it because of the lure of Antosca***, del Toro, and Felicity herself, and was, in the end, happy I did.

Check it out, if you’re so inclined, and maybe you’ll be glad you did, too…

Will you, I pray, demand that demidevil

Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

--Othello

   Act V - Scene II

* David S. Goyer is another co-producer.

** For my fellow comic book nerds out there, the one and only Guy Davis is credited for Lead Creature Design, as well as a bunch of drawings that appear onscreen.

Davis is also the main Creature Design dude for del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and has worked with him on a whole bunch of past productions…

In del Toro's own words: “Guy Davis, to me, is one of the best monster designers alive right now.”

*** And, speaking of, those, ahem, antlers on the one sheet should remind you of another thing Antosca worked on, that should in turn, tip you off as to the nature of Antlers’ Creature…

(That other thing is also to be found in the Iguana Archives.)

Parting Shot 1:

The short story “The Quiet Boy” can be read online here.

My personal recommendation is, if you haven’t already read the story but are curious to see the original source material, then check it out after you’ve seen Antlers.

Parting Shot 2:

In Antlers’ end credits roll, Christian Bale is one of the names under “Special Thanks”.

Cooper has worked with Bale on three films to date, the latest, the Netflix adaptation of Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye.

Looking forward to that one…

(Antlers OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

ROHTENBURG
(aka GRIMM LOVE)
(Review)

Katie Armstrong (Felicity herself, Keri Russell) is an American graduate student in Germany, whose chosen thesis subject is the case of Oliver Hartwin (Thomas Kretschmann, most widely known for his role as Captain Englehorn in Peter Jackson’s King Kong), who found a willing victim in Simon Grombeck (Thomas Huber, seen in the live action Aeon Flux), and ate him.
This is the chillingly gruesome premise of Martin Weisz’s first feature film, Rohtenburg (Grimm Love in the US, where it is currently on the festival circuit), a disturbing portrait of that dark territory where the positive, life-affirming traits of love, collide with the self-destructive tendencies of the disturbed and the deranged.
After establishing himself firmly in the commercial and music video worlds, Weisz delivers a solid and controversial debut, which ended up getting banned in Germany.

Relying largely on flashbacks, we accompany Katie on her journey of discovery as she travels the footpaths and backroads of Oliver’s and Simon’s lives, to perhaps better understand what led them to that place and time where one allowed the other to eat him, in order to consummate their love.
And with the largely chronological nature of the flashbacks, it quickly becomes apparent that the script by T.S. Faull is moving inexorably towards Katie’s viewing of the video Oliver shot of the death of Simon, an act that will perhaps allow her to fill the hole in her life left by some undisclosed loss. Katie believes that if she can somehow come to understand the truth behind that singular confluence where Oliver and Simon found each other, then perhaps she can come to grips with her own personal darkness.

With haunting music by Steven Gutheinz and the bleak, cold beauty of Jonathan Sela’s cinematography*, Rohtenburg is a riveting descent into the damaged lives of lonely, scarred individuals, who are only really yearning for that one particular other who can make them feel safe, and whole, who can understand them completely, who can look into their souls and not flinch from the abyss that waits there.
With strangely similar family backgrounds (estranged father, mentally unstable mother), Oliver and Simon seem like nothing so much as mirror selves, merely waiting for fate to allow them to see the other’s reflection, and to let them heal each other in the dark, ghoulish manner which they desire.

Kretschmann is hypnotic as the schizophrenic Oliver, who embraces the macabre urges that roil inside him, who, in his youth, only ever experienced giving—in his round-the-clock caring for his mother—can now really only take, to satisfy the child perpetually starved of affection. (His plea for more willing victims over the internet is simply the child in the candy shop, demanding more sweets.)
Huber meanwhile, is the sad and desperate picture of the secret victim, who tries to maintain a normal relationship with lover Felix (Marcus Lucas), while trawling the net in the early morning hours, visiting websites like the Cannibal Cantina, to sate his deviant hungers. And while Oliver’s need is to absorb, Simon’s is to be absorbed, to be completely subsumed—and more pointedly, consumed—by the act of love. (One of the most disturbing moments of the film—and there are many—is when Simon tells a male prostitute what he wants done to his penis.)
And as clearly warped and twisted as these psyches are, when they meet over the internet, there is a mutual, instinctual understanding that they have indeed found their other. It is one of Rohtenburg’s triumphs that the flurry of emails back and forth between Oliver and Simon is both a heartfelt exchange and a wildly disturbing taste of the extremes to which some people will go to find love.

And as witness to this bizarre relationship, Russell is effective as the audience’s proxy, also damaged and scarred by life (though perhaps not as much as either Oliver or Simon), trying to scry for the truth in the shadowed mirror of a love soured by death, of a union where eros and thanatos lay in each other’s arms, whispered sweet nothings into each other’s ears, then proceeded to sink their teeth into each other’s haunches.

Clearly, Rohtenburg is not to everyone’s tastes (pun most definitely intended). The material is decidedly dark and morbid.
But it is also imbued with a Gothic lyricism that never allows the film to become sordid and tawdry in the way other movies of the bizarre from last year—notably Terry Gilliam’s Tideland and Gyorgy Palfi’s Taxidermia—are.
While other films seem more content to repulse and revolt, Rohtenburg’s aim is to disturb and provoke. Where is the line that separates right from wrong where love is concerned? Consenting adults, after all. And these are the people their pathologies have made them into. This is their understanding of “love.” What right does society have to say otherwise?

Perhaps the saddest note in all this though, is the fact that Weisz went from horror with significant subtext to The Hills Have Eyes 2 (review in Archive: April 2007), exactly the sort of movie whose only real purpose is to repulse and revolt. Given what he achieved in Rohtenburg, I can only hope The Hills Have Eyes 2 was an aberration, and that his next film will have as much, ahem, to chew on, as Rohtenburg does.

* Jonathan Sela’s excellent cinematography can also be seen in John Moore‘s remake of The Omen, and in the upcoming film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train.

Parting shot: Rohtenburg earned Wiesz the Best Director nod at the 39th Sitges International Film Festival (Europe’s biggest fantasy-horror fest). It also snagged the Best Actor award, shared between Kretschmann and Huber, and Best Cinematography for Sela.

Parting shot 2: Rohtenburg is inspired by the real life case of the Metzgermeister (“Master Butcher”), Armin Meiwes. It was Meiwes’ complaint that his “personality rights” had been violated that resulted in the German ban.

(Rohtenburg and Grimm Love OS’s courtesy of impawards com; film image courtesy of bilder.filmstarts.de.)