film #22 of hooptober part vii: the new blood welcome to the most infuriating and disappointing film of 2020, folks. antebellum sells itself as a film from the people who brought you get out and us, and it certainly wants you to think it's going to be along those horror lines. but the gulf between jordan peele's wickedly sharp, biting films and this collection of wasted opportunities from gerard bush and christopher renz is very, very vast. let's start with one of the biggest problems with this film: it's not really trying to say anything. bush and renz have talked a big game about antebellum and how they wanted to start conversations that need to be had about race in america. that's admirable, but your film actually needs to speak for the conversation to start. instead of making anything that really approaches the point, the two run through the same kinds of tropes of slavery-era brutality on black people that we've seen a hundred times or more before. the first act introduces us to eden, played with far more dignity that the script gives her by janelle monae, and the "reformer" plantation that she is trapped on along with many other black people. for the first forty-plus minutes of this movie, we run through what is essentially another take on the torture and degradation of black people. there are so many problems with this. we see plenty of ugly brutality, but we learn almost nothing about the people that it is perpetrated on. we only learn a very small handful of names, and of those we do barely anything is known up to and including eden. i'm sure in bush and renz's mind, this was necessary to maintain the mystery of the film. but it also means that nearly full half of this film is just violence on black people without meaning or context. i refer you to read this essay on the movie by angelica jade bastién for vulture because it very clearly expresses parts of this issue in way that bastién can say far better than my white male ass can. all of that might be worth the time if antebellum came up with anything to say in the other two acts. but it doesn't. instead as we flash to monae playing an author named veronica, we get the set-up that something isn't all that it's cracked up to be here. cool, but you knew that from the trailer if you saw it. and even if you didn't, the mystery is easy to figure out very early in the film. bush and renz want the late second act/third act twist to be shocking, but by the time it happens we're like, "yep, there it is" and any dramatic weight of the moment is gone because they couldn't be subtle enough to foreshadow without telegraphing earlier in the film. it's all so frustrating because you can see the bones of greatness here. monae is an absolute star and she does what she can to make this work; it's not her fault that the script and direction fail her completely. the rest of the cast is fine, if somewhat unmemorable, with the exception of gabourey sidibe providing the absolute life of the film in a too-small part during act two and jena malone in a delightfully weird, off-putting depiction of white woman racism. i want to see whatever film those two characters were meant to be in because it was probably going to be a lot more interesting than this one. as it closes out, antebellum tries to make a couple salient points in the closing moments without spelling them out explicitly. the problem is, when your film has been this strange combination of blatantly on the nose but also content to not say anything remotely new, subtlety doesn't fly as an epilogue. i had a lot of high hopes for antebellum, and almost every single one of them was dashed.