Parents' Guide to Antlers

This horror tale benefits from interesting characters and performances -- and rather astonishing monster design -- but it suffers from too many cliches and jump-scares as the story wears a bit thin. Director Scott Cooper has jumped around among genres -- music drama (Crazy Heart), crime (Out of the Furnace), gangster story (Black Mass), Western (Hostiles) -- with fairly generic results each time, and Antlers, his fifth movie and first foray into horror, is no different (although the child-in-peril elements are a lot). As a former actor himself, Cooper does shape performances well. Russell's Julia wears her dark past like a festering wound, and the pain drives her forward. Plemons' Paul, on the other hand, has let tragedy beat him down; he's reluctant and sadly ineffectual. On the down side, Oscar-nominee Graham Greene is stuck in the cliched role of a wise old man who knows the truth about the monster.

Cooper's depiction of a dying town is quite powerful, even if the point is driven home a bit strongly. The movie demonstrates how a focus on corporations and profits leaves many people out in the cold. (Literally: Antlers has a chilling, wintry atmosphere and a feeling of frozen mud.) But after Cooper gets the story going, he isn't able to build a terrorizing rhythm. He falls back on old-time chestnuts like characters wandering around alone in the dark and making silly mistakes, basic jump-scares, and using brute force when ideas are called for. The truly mind-blowing monster, accompanied by hideous sound effects and a powerful score by Javier Navarrete (of Pan's Labyrinth; Guillermo Del Toro was a producer here), may win over some horror hounds. But for most others, it'll be a moot point.