ANTEBELLUM Review
The art of the plot twist is underappreciated in just how hard it is to craft a genuinely affecting switch up in the narrative. Some twists will single handedly carry a movie into the collective conscious while others will mercilessly sink the movie into the butt of some film buff’s joke forever. Either way, any movie can have an out there plot twist but very few not only surprise the viewer but also add some form of emotional meaning to said twist. That being said, director/writers Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s ANTEBELLUM is a film solely relying on the success of its twist and sadly, the twist may be the worst thing about this strange misfire of a movie.
With a film primarily built around its twist and with a marketing campaign aimed at throwing off audiences, it’s kind of hard to describe the plot that actually plays out in Bush and Renz’s wonky Twilight Zone-esque tale. But on the vaguest of terms, ANTEBELLUM concerns itself with the plight of Veronica (Janelle Monae), a successful African American author in the modern era who soon finds herself a victim to ominous events that seemingly transfer her back to the brutal Southern regime of the Antebellum era.
To describe or even order the rest of the events of the film, the twist would be given away almost immediately but when the twist finally does arrive, it’s honestly pretty dumb and tasteless, not only in idea (which is intentional) but in execution. The first part of the film attempts to throw viewers off with its depiction of the horrors that Veronica and other African Americans go through on a slave plantation hitting all the notes of torture and rape with the grotesque interest like that of a traveling showman. While Pedro Luque’s camera occasionally captures the effectively nauseating mix of the brutality and beauty of a vast Southern slave plantation, it still never manages to make the movie’s depiction of slavery seem anything less like a glamorous dismissal, as if saying “Yeah slavery was terrible, but how can we make the images of slavery look cool?”. While I’m sure that was far from the intention of the filmmakers, the decision to concoct a pseudo-horror/psychological thriller based around the idea of slavery seems like a tasteless idea to begin on anyway. But even tough subjects like slavery, through the lens of horror or any other genre have potential to become eye-opening and intriguing; sadly for the film, ANTEBELLUM is neither of those. Even when the film shifts to a more modern age in its dreadfully slow second act (which probably should’ve been its first act), ANTEBELLUM seems to be glancing at the audience, eager to show off its mind-blowing twist which, when finally revealed, only serves to make the amateur approach to the subject of slavery or African American persecution stand out even more.
While the likes of Jordan Peele are able to effectively wring horror thrills from both the supernatural and the more human atrocities aimed at African Americans, Bush and Renz tackle the idea of the plight of the modern day African American woman with the subtlety of an atomic bomb. But even with a rather idiotic story filled with what I assume are good intentions, the fact that the movie hardly manages to elicit any strong feelings besides boredom speaks to the filmmakers handle on their own story and production. The spooks are absent, the message is heavy-handed and obvious, and the twist as already mentioned is not only derivative but completely makes the whole film feel even more pointless as it has one thinking, “That’s it? That was kinda dumb.”. Throughout all these negatives, it’s not hard to see some semblance of a truly interesting idea at play here but the film doesn’t seem interested in going any deeper than its surface level horrors. And poor Janelle Monae, even as she continues to show her chops as a capable actor, displaying moments of terror and steely resolve in the film’s more interesting moments, she still can’t overcome the film’s massive flaws.
In the end, ANTEBELLUM was a movie so desperate to have its twist blow minds that it failed to develop any other aspect of itself and even then, its twist becomes nothing more than a sloppy, if somewhat interesting idea. Even so, the film’s main failing was not in it’s lackluster twist but in its end result of turning the era of slavery into something of a wonky amusement park ride.
1.5/5
