In short: Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

After a bit of fake documentary footage that enumerates the burned-down cinemas and dead festival programmers the mysterious Romanian film “Antrum” may or may not have caused, we get to the meat of the matter, namely, the actual cursed movie.

Here, a young woman named Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) takes her little brother Nathan (Rowan Smyth) into a forest camping, supposedly to enact a ritual that will eventually lay to rest the spirit of Nathan’s dead dog, whom Nathan believes to be in hell. In truth, Oralee is trying to help Nathan through his first close encounter with death via occult rituals she has made up herself.

However, the siblings encounter increasingly strange things and seem to drift into a realm where Oralee’s made-up rituals seem to be true and working, conjuring up powers the siblings will hardly be able to control or even understand. Also, a stop motion squirrel.

For once, the fake documentary bits about the cursed/bad/etc movie David Amito’s and Michael Laicini’s Antrum starts with and finishes on are not terribly interesting to me. Mostly, because I don’t believe the core narrative actually needs any of this high concept stuff to work at all.

The film’s core is a really wonderful recreation of the tone and general air of weird 70s cinema, the sort of movies that play out like extended trips into a filmmaker’s subconscious, movies full of shots that probably have some deep symbolic meaning to their makers but which seem puzzling to an outside viewer, where budget and vision are caught in a knife fight that makes an animatronic and/or stop motion squirrel look like a probable special effect.

Antrum’s approach to this kind of filmmaking never feels “ironic”, or in the need to assert that it’s so bad it’s good while winking at the audience. Rather, it truly gets into the spirit of these things by being earnest, careful, and weird in all the right ways, hitting the dream-like aspect these films take on at their best and keeping to it throughout.

Which of course also means that this isn’t a movie for everyone but rather people like me who love the more outsider-style 70s arm of horror with a passion. For people like us, this is basically paradise/hell, hypnotic and more than a little beautiful.