Antebellum is set to divide viewers due to its uncomfortable yet realistic, extreme violence. Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz deliver an undeniably shocking film, involving hard-to-watch depictions of torture, slavery, and racism.

| Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2023

Antebellum subverts the delusional and romanticized view of the American South while not abusing the slave narrative for shock value.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 17, 2023

“Antebellum” deserves an audience, not just for being good genre entertainment (which it is), but also for the richness of its underlying message.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2022

What works best - and worst - about Antebellum is wrapped up in its secrets and how the writer-directors' deal with them

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2022

As for the why of it all, that too stays shrouded in mystery-but perhaps that's for the best. The rest of the movie is rendered in such dull tones, such clumsy execution, that it's likely they would have fumbled a more concrete message.

| Sep 8, 2021

t's a touch of Westworld with a bit of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, plus a heaping helping of women-in-chains-style exploitation violence, but with added racism.

| Aug 8, 2021

Ramping up the two-dimensional good/bad contrast does cause the film to be more sensational than gritty, unfortunately; and the cleverness seems to overshadow any message of the film by the time we get to the end.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 4, 2021

See it on the biggest screen you can. It's a moment in cinema, and you'd be a fool to miss it.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 29, 2021

A fairly compelling, singularly strange Civil Rights mystery thriller...deployed effectively enough to hit the one mark it needs to hit, which is to have you knitting your brows half-way through the film wondering what the what is going on.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 28, 2021

The idea for "Antebellum" is intriguing, but the execution is not.

| Original Score: C- | Jun 24, 2021

The best Black horror blends scares with social commentary - this does neither.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 9, 2021

Antebellum possesses little beyond its ludicrous hook ... Instead, it's a lumpy, especially politically impotent episode of Black Mirror.

| Jun 5, 2021

Earnest performances somewhat make up for sloppy storytelling and heavy-handed proselytizing.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 4, 2021

Antebellum comes at a particularly fraught moment in our cultural present and forces viewers to think about race, white supremacy, and America's monstrous history through the horror genre.

| Apr 23, 2021

It proves how hard it is to make a remarkable film like Get Out or Us...this works on paper but doesn't earn its keep on screen.

| Apr 6, 2021

The revealed state of play is meant to be symbolic and satirical, but what hits you is how preposterous it is. In this context, the film's scenes of racist violence are horribly gratuitous.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 5, 2021

The visual style (lots of slow-mo) is sometimes overdone. But the ideas are alive, Monáe is a star and the drama is quietly unsettling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 2, 2021

While not full of jumps, Antebellum shines the light on a true horror that is still all too real.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 2, 2021

[I]n light of where the film eventually goes, smartly sets up its take-down of the dangerous nostalgia inherent in Make America Great Again-style thinking.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 2, 2021

It's an audacious swing - but ultimately a miss from a pair of filmmakers who know exactly what they want to say, and haven't yet mastered how best to say it.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2021