Wendiggy!

We saw a couple of previews of Antlers (2021) on other DVDs. Ms. Spenser liked the look, and it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, so we queued it up.

It takes place in the damp depressed Pacific Northwest. A kid is waiting in the pickup truck while his dad and a buddy are down in a mine - cooking meth, it turns out. Something comes out of the mine and the kid goes to investigate. We don't see what happens, but we don't think it will be great.

Next, we meet Keri Russell, a school teacher in the town. She moved back recently to live with her brother Jesse Plemons, the sheriff. They don't get along too well. We find out later that she ran away from her abusive father, leaving Plemons behind. We also see that she's trying desperately not to drink.

One of her students is Jeremy T. Thomas, a thin. bullied, withdrawn type. She tries to get close to him, and suspects that he is being abused. We see a bit of his life - he collects roadkill, takes it to his rundown house and tosses it into a locked room there. His father and brother, from the first scene, are in there. The father has become feral, and the brother blood thirsty. Eventually, the titular antlers come out of the father's mouth, followed by a monster that tears him apart from inside.

Russell visits the house, and finds it a shambles, stinking of death and rot. When she finds the locked room, she suspects that the children are being kept there, and opens it. Now the monster is loose. People start dying. Of course, in a small, dying town with a widespread drug problem, that's not too noticeable. Russell wants to do something about Thomas, but Plemons is just overwhelmed. He's tried to get help for him, but the state thinks he belongs with his dad.

Graham Green has been in the background, and is able to give the back story - the monster's a wendigo. Thanks, Mr. Green. He also has advice on how to kill it. Hope it works.

This story is pretty gruesome, both the monsters and the human monsters. Using the wendigo as a symbol for abuse, both drug and parental, makes sense. That's sort of what wendigos are. And the cast does an all around great job. But Ms. Spenser wasn't impressed. She couldn't buy that there was no way to help this obviously abused kid. Obviously, that was one of the points of the movie: we give up on the vulnerable too easily. She just thought it was far-fetched. Not too impressed by the monster design, either, although it showed a touch of del Toro. 

As for me, I thought it was pretty rough emotionally, but fell apart a little toward the end. I would put it on a double bill with Horns, another horny film in the PNW - but more fun, I think.