Antebellum: Racist past meets micro-aggressive racist present in carelessly offensive time-hopping tale

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C 

A movie with a sincere social message and an exploitation movie sensibility, Antebellum is a clumsy cousin of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, an allegory of racism in a horror film about entrapment that goes wide of the mark.  

Co-written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, the film stars singer-actress Janelle Monáe (Hidden Figures, Moonlight), in two time periods, the Civil War-era South and the present.

Janelle Monáe is a slave and a modern-day professional in the grade B Twilight Zone-ish Antebellum

The film has, not only a split time frame, but a split personality:  The cinematography, costumes, production values and decent cast, signal prestige. But the schematic writing, flat characterizations and level of brutality feel carelessly offensive.

The first 40 minutes of the film take place on a Louisiana plantation, with a white child and her mother on a lush green lawn around a plantation house that evokes Scarlett O’Hara’s precious estate Tara, from Gone with the Wind.  Following the long pan shot, we travel behind the plantation mansion, to where field slaves are picking cotton. Things start getting ugly. Be prepared to see Black people being struck, strangled, and tortured. One slave, (Monáe) is whipped, raped and branded by her overseer (Eric Lange). The sexual abuse isn’t graphic but there’s a close-up of Eden’s scream when the branding iron is applied to her body.

“Say your name,” insists Eden’s tormentor repeatedly, in what appears to be an inside allusion to Monáe’s 2015 protest song, Hell You Talmabout, which calls on the audience to chant the names of victims of police violence: (David Byrne performs a cover version of the song in the concert film, American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, which premiered at this  month’s Toronto International Film Festival.)

That’s just one of many unsubtle signals that what we are seeing is not strictly about historical verisimilitude. After a battlefield victory, a troupe of Confederate soldiers carrying torches and offer an anachronistic chant “Blood and soil”, like the Confederate flag-bearing white supremacists at the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally. That event, and the killing of anti-racist protestor, Heather Heyer, demolished any romantic illusions that the culture of Confederate flags, statues and battle enactments, was just for eccentric history buffs.

After a while of playing connect-the-reference-dots, you may seriously start to ask yourself, “why am I watching simulations of Black people being abused for this long?” when a phone rings off-screen. The movie shifts to the present day and an apparently pleasanter story. 

In the shiny new world, Monáe also plays an author named Veronica who lives in a luxurious home with a loving husband and cute daughter. Veronica’s a media star, who out-argues a conservative congressman on TV, fields a Zoom call interview, and then heads off to New Orleans to offer progressive TED Talks on Black women’s empowerment. While Monáe’s performance is charismatic and committed, her characters are more indicators of social status than human beings with an inner life.

After the talk, Veronica arranges to go out with a couple of friends, including the brash comic-relief friend (Gabourey Sidibe) for a girls night out, of sexy clothes, drinks and fine dining.

Although Antebellum doesn’t match the progressive paranoia of Get Out, there are signals that things here aren’t right. There’s a Zoom call from a white “head-hunter” (Jena Malone) who also appeared in the Civil War sequence as a plantation madam). She compliments Veronica on being “articulate” and praises her bold shade of lipstick. 

Later, there’s a hotel desk clerk who ignores her to take a call, before greeting her with a fixed smile. Then there’s a waiter who suggests that the women might prefer the cheaper prosecco to the bottle of champagne that they have ordered.

While charting these racial micro-aggressions, we again wonder where this is leading.  Nowhere interesting, unfortunately. 

The idea of discovering parallel lives, through supernatural time-travel or historical investigation, to discover how the wounds of the past lead to the scars of today, can be a fruitful one. But Antebellum’s third act, alas, settles for a cringe-worthy Twilight Zone-style “twist” that deflates whatever positive intentions the filmmakers had.

Antebellum is introduced by one of William Faulkner’s best-known lines:  "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I found myself thinking of a less familiar but more apt quote from a minor 1912 American novel by Frances Reed, about English antipathy to the Irish: “We may forgive those who injure us but we can never forgive those who we have injured irreparably.”

Antebellum. Directed and written by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. With Janelle Monáe, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons and Gabourey Sidibe. Available at home on demand, Friday, September 18.