Full disclosure. We guessed the plot, direction and even mythos of Scott Cooper’s Antlers within, no joke, the opening minutes. Granted, this was mainly owing to the prologue (and much of what was to follow) being almost nigh-dentical in lore and in its locale of a dimly-lit former mining complex, to one of Supermassive Games’ highly successful horror releases (we’ll try to steer from overt spoiler territory by naming which one), but this bit of horror mythos geekery merely gave a head start on what was to quickly become a drawn-out and predictable affair even for those coming at it ‘blind’.

The biggest trouble with Antlers lies principally with its screenplay and storytelling. It’s a handsomely shot affair; Florian Hoffmeister bathes its small Oregon suburb in so much fog, drizzle and mire as to make it borderline monochromatic, effectively soaking the piece in mood and atmosphere. Cooper mostly directs in a deft, measured fashion, even if there’s doubtless a much tighter and more purposeful cut buried away somewhere amongst the first hour’s laboured meandering in particular.

At a conceptual level, Antlers tackles some interesting ideas. In a small, isolated mountain town, a series of disappearances and deaths seem to pivot around troubled young schoolboy Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas, a talent to certainly watch), with his teacher Julia (Keri Russell) taking it upon herself to begin uncovering the truth; doubly so when she happens upon some particularly worrying drawings and reference texts young Lucas has stashed away in his desk. She also happens to be the sister of the town’s reluctant sheriff, Paul (the ever-reliable Jesse Plemons, who deserved more dimension from an underwritten supporting turn), whom she has recently returned home to live with.

Oh, and she has trauma. Trauma to spare. In case you don’t get the subtleties and nuances of her childhood plight as first depicted with screamingly obvious flashback glimpses in what is only the character’s second scene, Cooper and co-writers Nick Acosta and C. Henry Chaisson find ways to crowbar this subtext in to almost every scene in which she appears, and scarcely with much in the way of subtlety.

“Trust me, I’m well equipped to know when someone is being abused,” the character exclaims as she takes her findings and suspicions about her troubled pupil to the boss. Lather, rinse, repeat… and then sprinkle with yet more flashbacks a little later on in case, you know, anyone left in the cinema hasn’t gone completely glass-eyed from it all.

The trouble is, had Antlers left the parallels between the cyclical nature of abuse and the more supernatural goings-on of Lucas’ story to just light allegory and some surface symbolism, it would have been a far more satisfying experience. The creatives here are capable of it – see their much defter inferences that deforestation, industrialisation and man’s encroachment on the natural world is getting mother nature more than a little pissed off. But instead, where Cooper and co. think they are being frightfully clever and miminalist with their handling of trauma and abuse, they instead pummel it in with the grace and delicateness of napalm.

Worse still, it becomes apparent very early on what some of the twists and turns to come will be, and instead of leaning in further to affirm or indulge in the nastiness of it all, Cooper spends far too much time attempting to create a sense of mystery or suspense when the audience is already ten steps ahead.

There is some grim delight to be had in some of the more twisted moments of the opening hour, but they are scarce, and ultimately repetitive. It’s a shame, because Tim Grimes’ production design marries with Hoffmeister’s cinematography to lend a sickly, wet and truly disconcerting feel to some of Antlers‘ grislier moments and set pieces, and, come the finale, Cooper knows just how to frame, capture and light the film’s antagonist to almost Spielbergian effect. The design and camera work for an eleventh hour showdown are particularly excellent.

It’s a shame then, that after a plodding, laboured first hour, what follows quickly descends into a nonsense of formulaic horror cinema 101, some truly bonkers character decisions (no… do not go outside to investigate that strange noise when you know there are murders and deaths occurring quite literally on your doorstep, you FOOL) and a complete suspension of disbelief in regards to the mechanics and logistics of what is happening in this town. What’s that, immediately call it in and request backup when you find a fellow police officer brutally killed? Not in this town, friend!

Russell’s Julia, for instance, takes it upon herself to just take Lucas home after a particularly grisly discovery and turn of events (and a subsequent brief stay in hospital all alone for the poor boy), and, despite this being a child who has been at the scene of multiple murders, her brother (you know, the Sheriff) doesn’t see anything wrong with this. Apparently, Antlers takes places in an America that has never heard of appropriate adults, social services or child protection procedure.

It doesn’t help that the relationship Julia adopts with Lucas is, when you scrape it down to its core, so underwritten and obvious that it becomes utterly toxic and inappropriate; the troubled teacher projecting her own abuse, trauma and father issues onto this boy, at times even downright manipulating him and broaching subjects that morally, ethically and professionally just wave nothing but the biggest and reddest of flags. It is so egregious, and so bluntly slathering the symbolism of abuse onto the horrifying events surrounding Lucas, that you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie was going to atually lean into self-awareness and acknowledge this being far from a healthy set up (it should have done – it would have made for a much more fascinating study). Perhaps Plemons’ Paul would step in and forbid his sister from continuing to attach herself to the boy – for both personal and professional reasons – injecting some much-needed conflict between the two characters.

Instead, Antlers ultimately comes to treat Russell’s character almost akin to a saviour figure. It’s all horribly misjudged; where she should probably be losing her job and getting a restraining order, she instead becomes the film’s Ellen Ripley, and it all demonstrates a screenplay in desperate need of more time in the oven (and more brains on the page). Perhaps nowhere is this more soberingly apparent than in the finale, where we come to the morbid realisation that a key character whom could perhaps have offered some hope or ambiguity, was actually in the film the whole time just to fulfill a much simpler, depressing and wholly unnecessary function.

There’s promise tucked away beneath the murky, rain-soaked exterior of Antlers, and as mentioned it’s a gorgeously bleak thing to admire from an aesthetic perspective, but its potential is trodden so deep underfoot by the clunky writing, questionable character work and delusion that it is tackling its subtext with any semblance of nuance, that the whole thing becomes a feat of endurance without anywhere enough in the way of either thrills, scares or satisfying payoff. It takes too long to get going, and then jetties logic and restraint to descend into borderline B-movie schlock. As mentioned, you’ll likely spend much of the runtime twenty-or-so minutes ahead of where Cooper thinks you’d be, with a particular late-game sting you’d have to be asleep to not have already seen coming a mile off.

It makes Antlers difficult to recommend, as the only thing it truly does successfully from the perspective of a new arrival to the horror playground is looking good (very good). That extends to the villainous entity it unleashes upon its world, too, and yes, there are creepy moments and some disturbing, effective visuals smattered throughout, but it takes itself so seriously, and is so almost perplexingly self-important in its blundering application of subtext and subject matter, that it ends up being ultimately little more than a frustratingly pretty and rarely frightening mess.