Review: 'The Antenna' is an Exercise in Horror

With "The Antenna," writer-director Orcun Behram deftly takes aim at the totalitarianism and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns that have come to plague the globe. The film is an exercise in horror, but also a chiller in another way: It finds the core of sick dread that you may have been carrying around with you for, say, the last four years or so, and gives it a nasty little tug.

The analogies the film uses are hardly subtle, and they don't need to be. When the day arrives for a state-provided satellite dish to be installed on the roof of an apartment building located somewhere remote and windswept in Turkey (the place and time are generically miserable, plagued by cold, rain, and spiritual malaise), tragedy and terror are the immediate result. The first victim is the technician sent to install the new antenna; after that, the inhabitants of the building begin to face an escalating series of disasters, all of it seemingly driven by a mysterious black ooze that drips down from the antenna and begins the spread to every apartment, and every occupant, in the building.

Standing on the vanguard of the building's defense against rot and corruption is maintenance man Mehmet (Ihsan �nal), an anxious insomniac with a soft spot for the building's most beautiful young woman, Yasemin (G�l Arici).

Mehmet may be alone in his gentle affections for Yasemin, but that's not to say she hasn't attracted the wrong sort of attention from the building's supervisor, Cihan (Levent �nsal), the sort of person who's a mid-level bully and boss from hell to anyone luckless enough to have him as a superior. Cihan has every intention of putting Yasemin under his thumb and making her his employee; he's already sealed the deal with her father, Firat (Enis Yildiz), the sort of man who gives a bad reputation to the word "paterfamilias."

Elsewhere in the building, Hakan (Murat Saglam) frets about his long-term unemployment and the prospects for his family. He's determined not to lose hope in the future, telling wife Cemile (Elif Cakman) that the state will come to their aid; but with a new broadcasting system scheduled to commence that very night, the question soon shifts to who, if anyone the state intends to spare.

Behram loads the film's sound design with creaks, bumps, and creepy liquid groans that chart the progress of the creeping ooze, and when he uses horror-movie tropes (such as hideous noises emanating from the walls of a young boy's bedroom) he finds imaginative ways to let the viewer's imagination do the heavy lifting. (Rather than showing the walls breathing or rippling, Behram opts for the drawings pinned up on the wall to flutter, as if stirred by some ill wind.)

In Western literature, of course, the lone good guy – full of courage and resourcefulness – triumphs over evil in the end. But this is not a Hollywood movie, and ever if it were the question looms large as to just how much longer the Western world can sustain its illusions about the power of one small pinpoint of light standing firm against literal tides of darkness. That's the question Behram asks us to ponder – never more so than with a late-breaking heroic gesture in which a pen fittingly becomes a weapon – but he's not willing to pander. He lets us face these demons as best we can.