Dispatch: Friday at the Chicago Int’l Film Festival is Perfect for a Spooky Drive-in or International Cinema
Antlers
From director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and, perhaps more tellingly, producer Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) comes the grungy, bloody, organically gruesome scare show Antlers, about a middle school teacher (Keri Russell), who moves to the small, crumbling Oregon town where her brother (Jesse Plemons) is the local sheriff. Both of them had a tough upbringing made all the tougher on Plemons when Russell’s character ran away as soon as she could, leaving him to fend off their drunken father. She gets caught up in the family drama of one of her young students (Jeremy T. Thomas), whose father and younger brother have a shared secret back home that sadly involves the elder child in a way that is screwing up his sleep schedule and his already fragile mind, so he comes to school looking like death warmed over and drawing disturbing images of what’s going on in his house. But once we get some clues about what exactly going one with the two (especially the father), Cooper cranks things up considerably, beginning with an opening sequence in a mine shaft that kicks things off with an impactful scare. Based on the short story The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca, Antlers combines the folklore of the indigenous people of the area with a healthy dose of family drama to keep us terrified and blood soaked. The film drags and gets a bit visually murky near the end, but most of the storytelling and creature makeup design is artful and effective, while Russell and Plemons give us really strong and emotional performances to sell their shared trauma of the past and present. (Steve Prokopy)
Antlers screens Fri., Oct. 15 at 7pm at ChiTown Movies Drive-In and opens theatrically on October 29.
Hellbender
One of the more fascinating genre offerings making its way through the festival circuit this year comes from the the Adams family (Toby Poser, Zelda Adams, and John Adams, The Deeper You Dig), who wrote and directed Hellbender, a heavenly slice of folk horror about a mother and daughter (real-life mother, Poser, and daughter, Zelda Adams, as Izzy). They live alone in the woods, playing in a two-person metal band complete with makeup and costumes; living off the land; and occasionally dabbling into the dark arts that are a rich part of their ancestry (which includes witches in their bloodline being burned hundreds of years earlier, as we see in flashbacks). Izzy is being kept in the dark about the full extend of what her mother’s powers are and what she could learn to do herself, especially after she feasts on living creatures (the two live on twigs and berries, essentially, to keep Iggy’s powers from fully blossoming). But Izzy is a teenager who is growing bored of her life, and she ventures beyond their property and runs into another teenager girl, Amber (Lulu Adams), who finds her new acquaintance a curiosity more than a friend. Before long, Izzy begins to understand her potential and demands that her mother show her the way toward growing into a full-on witch, which is part magical journey/part disturbing coming-of-age story that also digs into the shifting nature of the mother-and-daughter connection. Soon, the mother begins to understand that just because she thinks she raised Izzy to respect nature and the powers it provides them doesn’t mean Izzy plans to use these abilities for good. It’s a complex and ambitious perspective on the witching lifestyle that takes the subject seriously without forgetting to freak us out in the process. (Steve Prokopy)
Hellbender screens Fri., Oct. 15 at 9:30pm at ChiTown Movies Drive-In. The film is part of a double feature with Eyes of Fire, co-presented as part of the Music Box Theatre’s Music Box of Horror: Dawn of the Drive-In event.