IGN serves a global audience, so with Antebellum being released on Premium VOD and in select international markets on Sept. 18, we are publishing our review from Siddhant Adlakha who watched the movie via a digital screener. Read more on IGN’s policy on movie reviews in light of COVID-19 here. IGN strongly encourages anyone considering going to a movie theater during the COVID-19 pandemic to check their local public health and safety guidelines before buying a ticket.
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There are a few things you should know going into Janelle Monáe-starrer Antebellum. For one, it’s a genre movie mining the horrific images of American slavery; your mileage may vary. For another, the film’s marketing gives away a whole lot more than it should — so much that the way the film is constructed and the way its trailers play out feel like opposing forces, attempting to sabotage one another. I’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum, and behind another warning later on, but Antebellum is also impossible to discuss in-depth, or even in passing, without at least touching on what the film approaches as a major twist to its premise (even though, in retrospect, all the big ideas it teases end up playing like setups with no payoff, and promises unkept).
Why touch on these reveals at all? Well, in a bid to be a relevant story about the horrors of America’s past, Antebellum takes so many wrong turns, and shoots itself in the foot so many times, that it’s hard not to wonder how a film this jaw-droppingly terrible in execution was ever slated for theatrical release (back in April, though the pandemic has mercifully moved it to VOD on September 18th).
The film begins with a fitting Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Before its opening frames, it already positions itself as a story about the way the past manifests in the present — no doubt a relevant topic, as America continues to grapple with the long-standing specter of its racial history. If nothing else, its opening scenes offer the promise of a blood-curdling, richly detailed world in the form of a Southern plantation overrun with Confederate soldiers. In a single take, it explores the façade of the lavish mansion, the fields in which the enslaved are put to work, and, eventually, the cabins in which they dwell, before narrowing in on a terrifying scene of soldiers gunning down a Black woman attempting to escape, conjuring images of the many cell-phone videos that spur protest movements in the present.
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This opening is, admittedly, a stellar technical achievement. It’s also where things begin to feel a little uncanny, sometimes for the right reasons, and sometimes not. Monáe’s character, in the few moments we glimpse her in this opening, feels out of place when she’s brought to the plantation for the first time (this turns out to be one of those “right reasons,” at least at first). She seems a bit too put together, too composed, and too well taken care of for an enslaved person in the Antebellum South — I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention 12 Years A Slave by Steve McQueen, the story of a free Black man kidnapped into slavery, which immediately sprung to mind. Of course, no one belongs in these conditions, not just Monáe; that’s part of Antebellum’s point, but it’s a statement it ends up making tactlessly.
12 Years A Slave also comes to mind because of the immediacy with which Antebellum leaps into the physical torment of the era, as Nate Wonder and Roman GianArthur’s harsh musical score couches the violent opening in a sense of creeping dread. The promise made by these initial moments is that of a familiar tale of American history, so often mined for inspirational “prestige” drama, being re-framed as something it always was for African-Americans: a horror story. But even before this opening scene has ended, little hints of wrong-headed decision-making begin to creep into its fabric. That eerie score I mentioned is pulsating and unnerving, but about five minutes into the track, I felt like I was having a stroke when it began to closely resemble the opening theme from the 1992 X-Men animated series.
In isolation, who cares? Though in totality, the film’s strangeness never ceases and sitting through it feels like a surreal experience for all the wrong reasons. When drawing from the well of these particular horrors, storytellers really ought to have something to say about them, or else the result is little more than trauma porn. Soon after her arrival, Monáe’s character — dubbed Eden — is branded and assaulted by a Confederate general in a lengthy sequence that overstays its welcome, and ends up having little narrative purpose anyway (beyond recreating historical torment) because the film simply skips forward six weeks, to when Eden is more acclimated to her predicament. She behaves strangely, in ways that don’t quite make sense yet, like crab-walking across her cabin floor and carving… something on her wall, which we don’t yet see. And while the purpose of these various oddities is eventually revealed (well over an hour later), in the meantime, they come off as bizarre character quirks that only serve to distance us from her.
The film, by virtue of the story it’s trying to tell and the specific rugs it wants to pull, cannot yet bring us into her point of view, but the result of this is far more frustrating than it is mysterious. Other enslaved characters show up at her door and appear to speak in code or shorthand, and eventually, another new arrival dubbed Julia (Kiersey Clemons) confronts Eden about why she won’t lead the rest of them to escape. Julia, like Eden, feels somewhat out of place as well, so before long, these odd behaviors begin to hint at something strange underlying the premise.
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However, these hints are brought about through mere verbal exchanges, which isn’t nearly enough to imbue the film with the kind of mystery first-time feature writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz seem to aim for. None of these apparent disconnects are unsettling enough to be surreal, or to draw these past images into the present in any concrete way; these conversations are merely shot and edited with the easy-breezy aesthetic of two friends discussing their favorite music. The film fails to draw the eye or to emphasize, even momentarily, that these little ideas must eventually amount to something; so much of what the film attempts just ends up looking like a series of mistakes.
When the film does eventually tip its hand about 40 minutes in, it reveals what at first appears to be some supernatural or dreamlike grounding in our present political moment, as if the specters of an unconfronted past are about to leap through the screen and shake us by the shoulders. However, this promise of some powerful thematic through-line is walked back in a number of frustrating ways, until eventually, the aforementioned uncanniness in the cabin is revealed to be far less interesting than whatever the marketing and the film itself appear to have promised. The result is the connection between past and present feeling tenuous at best — but to even begin to talk about why requires at least mentioning some things that appear to have been “spoiled” by the film’s final trailer.
Since I had the experience of watching Antebellum without stumbling upon these reveals, I’ll leave you with that second SPOILER warning now, in case you’d like to do the same.
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So, as the trailers reveal, there is a modern-day element to Antebellum, which attempts to better ground these historical atrocities in the present. Monáe and a handful of other actors appear both in this 21st-century metropolitan setting as well as during the Civil War, and the marketing even hints at some sort of supernatural goings-on, meant to tether these two “timelines” together. The film offers a couple of supernatural hints as well, though not nearly to the same degree as the trailers, which appear to have been constructed as pre-emptive apologia. As you may have surmised, the fact that some of the film unfolds in the present is actually a major plot twist; Monáe also plays author and media personality Veronica Henley, whose work explaining and exploring American racism has caught the attention of some shadowy organization, which speaks in riddles about history and about being “chosen,” and appears to have some connection to why someone with Monáe’s appearance in the present also exists in this mildly uncanny past.
The film even lingers on Henley’s back, where Eden was branded, as she appears to sense something out of the ordinary, hinting at some cerebral or spiritual link between these two stories. This idea begins to solidify in these present scenes, when the ghosts of America’s racial past start to manifest, sometimes metaphorically — in the form of paintings of plantations, hung unapologetically in hotel lobbies — and sometimes more literally, though in ways that are spread so far apart that practically nothing happens in between before these elements are dropped from the film entirely. A conversation between Henley and a friend speaks to the idea that our ancestors can live on through us, even in our dreams, but these little hints are also brushed aside for something far less interesting, with far less engaging commentary on the ways in which traumas latch on to you over time, and the ways history has a tendency to reappear after it’s been swept under the rug.
Adding to the frustration is the fact that Antebellum, from this point on, doesn’t really return to the plantation scenes until its tensionless final act, which answers none of the lingering questions set up in this middle section. The film remains in the present for a bafflingly long stretch (despite teasing and then faking out cross-cuts to the past one more than one occasion!). Instead of exploring these apparent connections in any meaningful way — visually or thematically — it focuses entirely on conversations rife with buzzwords ripped from online discourse, rather than the way actual human beings might talk to one another. The actors may as well be reciting the subtext of their lines, rather than finding ways to bring that subtext to the surface through nuance and human emotion (every other element of the filmmaking feels geared to this approach as well).
Eventually, Henley’s extended conversations with these new characters don’t even matter. Rather than offering anything of substance, they feel like scrolling through a thoughtless Twitter thread, and they end up having no actual bearing on the plot. And while one dinner scene, in particular, offers minor hints of surrealism through its framing, it does so only for its audience. Minor characters, whose faces seem intentionally obscured, play like they might have a greater significance to the duality of this setting (especially since a couple of other actors have re-appeared in both “timelines”). But if it were to turn out, in some behind-the-scenes commentary, that these characters were just poorly shot and edited, that would make just as much sense. Absolutely nothing comes of this occasionally dreamlike presentation. It isn’t sustained enough to create any kind of ethereal or unsettling mood, so it’s business as usual for Henley, who barely seems to notice anything is amiss.
When it’s revealed why this is, and what the connection between the two “timelines” actually is, everything clicks into place in the most unimaginative way, recontextualizing the film’s own imagery in a manner that feels inappropriate at best.
Antebellum wants to be Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out and the controversial 2018 Broadway hit Slave Play rolled into one, but it lacks the former’s understanding of the ways modern racism manifests, the latter’s intricacy in dealing with lingering racial traumas, and both stories’ penchant for treating historical atrocity as a resurgent horror that seeps into your bones. Instead, it merely asks what would happen if you laid images from then and now side-by-side, almost at random, with so little care for cause-and-effect or for the meaning behind them that the film ends up having nothing to say about either the past or the present.
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