3 out of 5

Directed by: David Amito and Michael Laicini

I appreciate Antrum’s ambition. It’s slow, and unconvincing in what it’s attempting to do, but there’s definitely a vision – which keeps its watchability intact – and, ultimately, writers / directors David Amito and Michael Laicini settled on a line for the flick to follow and did not deviate, which brought me around in the end. That might sound like the opposite of ambition, but the particular line Antrum follows is one which cuts through over-explanations or justifications – it has a mission statement (which it uses a framing narrative to set up), and it executes that, and that’s it. As things proceeded, and I expected this to be the case, dissatisfaction crept in; then again, there’s a problem when presenting things as “real” – which Antrum tries to do – which is that they’re not real, and so little bows tied on a story absolutely counter any reality you’ve established. This butts up against the flick’s aforementioned unconvincing nature, of course…

Antrum is a movie within a mockumentary. That movie is called Antrum, and we’re watching the doc about its notoriety and discovery and now, representation: it’s a flick that appeared only in limited bursts, and seemed to cause its viewers to die in some horrific ways thereafter, i.e. a “cursed” movie. While there are some criticisms that the framing documentary – the bulk of the movie is us watching the refurbished ‘Antrum’ – come across as fake, I found it to be the more substantial, tonally, of the movie’s two parts, as it felt perfectly in line with a kind of “top 10 spookiest movies” show you’d see on Shudder or some such, meaning it comes bundled with some tongue-in-cheek vibes and awareness of similar media. This is also where the line I mentioned is formed, though, as the doc explains what we’re about to watch: a fairly humdrum movie, with some sound / visuals spliced in which don’t seem to match the source material, and with subliminal imagery flashing up throughout. This is… exactly what you get.

And then: Antrum. A sister (Nicole Tompkins) helps her younger brother (Rowan Smyth) get over the death of their dog by taking him into the woods on a quest to reconnect with the dog’s spirit. This is kind of a rough, silly concept, but – sure. Where it stretches things is that this quest is specifically to dig a hole to Hell, because that’s where mum said the dog went. O… kay. And the sister also has procured a book that explains the different levels of Hell they’ll dig through, and has taught her brother a whole bunch of spells and rituals to protect themselves, and while setting up this very complex fantasy of dog-spirit connecting, she also makes sure to tell him ghost stories about Cerberus to freak him out. It is at this level of plotting where I admittedly can’t tell if Amito and Laicini were just plotting backwards to justify some of their visuals / concepts, or purposefully going all-in on Antrum being not a great movie. Either way, I was checking my watch throughout this thing, because, again, we’ve been warned about all the subliminal stuff, so when it creeps in, there’s not much to it – Antrum is slow.

There’s some intrigue when events in the woods start to go awry, but the framing documentary has not suggested the film will go anywhere too questionable, so there’s an air of limitation to this. Again: the creators stuck to their line.

The visuals of Antrum (the movie-within-the-mockumentary) are uneven. The setting thankfully precludes doing a lot of set dressing for the 70s era, leaving it down to costumes and the “look” of the film. While the coloring / degrading feels a bit superficial, it looks enough of the part, and I do think the camera work vibes with era-appropriate low budget horror. While Tompkins’ and Smyth’s acting is just fine, and we get some thrift clothing for them, the direction of their acting and exact dialogue feels like it whiffs a bit – this is an opinion without anything to back it up but personal vibes, but it just comes across as too modern. There’s often a bit of naivety to flick from this time; a sense of discovery. And that’s lacking. This isn’t bad, as it gives Antrum an out-of-time sensibility, but I don’t think that’s played up – I think the intention was to make it seem like a relic.

Antrum ends, and we’re back to the mockumentary. Some details are pointed out more closely, but you’re not going to get any post-script surprise, or deeper dives into that spliced footage. No one’s giving much voice to whether or not we should be worried that we’re now cursed, and that’s maybe the biggest disappointment: I didn’t walk away from this creeped out. But given how much I had to say about a movie that didn’t land, it’s had some effect, and, as mentioned, I came to realize that the filmmakers haven’t misled us at all about what we watched. It is what it is. There are some interesting conceptual pieces to consider; there are a couple of effectively spooky compositions. It sticks to its script. Maybe that wasn’t the most effective way to tell this story, but it was an admirably ambitious one.