Bear with me on this one, because I’m feeling a bit apprehensive about writing a review for this particular movie. As I have been making a regular habit of mentioning around here, I am a suburban white dude from Sydney, Australia, and while I don’t shy away from discussing rather grisly topics over the course of these reviews… gotta admit, being able to do justice to the American original sin that is slavery has always felt like one of my blind spots. I mean, I’m as far away from knowing the first-hand black experience as it’s possible to get, and I have certain fears that my takes about a given film to do with the topic might end up trivialising this aspect of that experience. And that's something I really want to be careful about when discussing Antebellum, which mishandles the topic worse than any other film I've covered on here.
For a start, this barely qualifies as a horror film. The filmmakers seem to be far more interested in looking good by film school standards than actually setting up atmosphere or tension or, most importantly, context. The closest this gets to actually being scary is in its depictions of sadistic violence against its black characters, particular the slaves at the titular plantation. It treats violence, both physical and sexual, against slaves in the same way exploitation filmmakers treated Nazi atrocities back in the ‘70s, where it’s shown with such gratuity that it’s uncomfortable to watch but doesn’t really say anything about the institutions that allowed such behaviour to exist. Violence for its own sake and nothing else; it’s horror as interpreted by people who hate horror.
Not the film is entirely devoid of context, though. In fact, it spends quite a bit of its run time forcing comparisons between racial mistreatment during the Civil War and racial mistreatment in the modern day. For instance, there’s an early scene where Confederate soldiers are marching to their camp, torches in hand, while they chant “Blood and soil”. It’s a decent approach, but the execution within the narrative is about as cack-handed as it gets.
It is aggressively straight-forward in how it plays the
past/present allegory, to the point of taking it to a literal place that *SPOILERS*
feels like the malformed offspring of Get Out, The Village, and the plantation two-parter from Alan Moore’s run on
Swamp Thing. Just without the wealth of modern context, the lucidity of
progression leading up to the big plot twist (seriously, the non-linear
storytelling here is migraine-inducing in the extreme), or the poignancy in its
statements about reliving such a dark chapter of American history for the sake
of salacious entertainment. Oh, the irony.
I could honestly spend the rest of this review just bringing up examples of media that does the core concept of this film better justice (Clipping.’s Splendor & Misery manages to say more about the existential hell of slavery and the use of genre tropes as a sign of generational solidarity in a fraction of the time it takes to sit through this). But quite frankly, that’s not what truly makes me hate this thing. No, that comes with how its bluntness and lack-of-care with its theming comes across like its writer/directors are really, really proud of what they’re doing here. Like just saying “Slavery is bad and racism is still a thing” is the most insightful shit they could come up with and they want the audience to know just how clever they are for voicing it. It’s all the eye-rolling faux-urgency of The Hunt, except this can’t even succeed within its own genre, let alone what it's being used to say.
I am genuinely struggling to think of another film I’ve seen so far this year that was a bigger crock of horseshit than this is, to the point where it outdoes Richard Jewell in how even its own positives are part of the bigger problem. Yes, the acting is fairly good, with Janelle Monรกe being charismatic as fuck as per usual, the soundtrack is beautiful, and the visuals are quite pretty. Except the acting pedigree only serves to highlight how clinical and unempathetic the depiction of their injustices turns out to be, the soundtrack works best when removed from the rest of the production, and the visuals follow the script in that they don’t really say anything beyond the obvious.
As commentary on racism, this manages to be both ham-fisted and completely non-essential, managing to generate less insight with its 106 minutes of mindless brutality than a single video of a policeman kneeling on a black man’s throat.
No comments:
Post a Comment