There’s something in the water in writer/director Orçun Behram’s horror film The Antenna (2019). Filled with unnerving imagery and bubbling with anticipation for much of its runtime, Behram crafted one chilling dystopian thriller that will make you want to throw your TV out and put cement over your wall sockets. Horror takes many different forms in The Antenna, employing political horror from a seemingly omnipresent and oppressive government, as well as a menacing monster oozing through one unlucky apartment building.

The Antenna begins with a building superintendent named Mehmet (Ihsan Önal) having a satellite dish installed due to the government rolling out a new televised daily bulletin program for its citizens. After witnessing the satellite installer fall to his gruesome death, Mehmet dutifully continues with his day of seeing to the needs of the building’s residents by cleaning up a mysterious black liquid seeping from the walls in one apartment and fixing the cable for another apartment. Unbeknownst to Mehmet the issues are correlated, as the thick black ooze permeates the building and begins controlling the residents once the satellite is installed and the propagandized transmissions begin.

For a while the pacing of the film had me wondering if The Antenna was going to be the absolute slowest horror movie I had ever seen, but then a glimmer of hope in the form of a well-framed and choreographed bathroom scene finally gave a jolt of suspense to the movie. Luckily, it only takes about a third of the movie to unfold before this slow burner begins to have a steady boil with unsettling music and some truly horrific moments inflicted upon the residents of the plagued building. The terror snuck up on me after having been lulled into that false sense of boredom and The Antenna turned out to be a raw, arthouse-looking thriller whose cleverly layered narrative and eerie atmosphere was quite the horrific breath of fresh air. This movie gets pretty surreal and artfully layers nuances specific to Turkey (the movie’s setting), such as the faceless entities that likely represent those without freedom of speech.

Though it feels original, there are certain points where The Antenna seemed to pay homage to the body-horror found in Shinya Tsukamoto or Cronenberg movies and, at other times, used the blackened waters found in many J-horror movies. If you enjoyed Await Further Instructions (2018) I imagine you would enjoy The Antenna, with both movies working the technological mind control angle. The Antenna, however, leans more into the horror of oppression by using the very tangible threat of government forced indoctrination instead of aliens…or was it aliens? The Antenna gives nothing away that it does not need to, showing without telling and leaving the origins, motivation, and background of both the government programs and the ooze up to audience interpretation. Though the ending seemed abrupt and could have used some fleshing out, I was grateful this much-too-long movie found some semblance of closure.

Because the movie ends so abruptly the whole ordeal seem pointless, which is unfortunate, because the social commentary and the obviously keen eye of its visual director show that The Antenna certainly has a lot to say about freedom of speech–too bad the film’s narrative is quiet compared to its bold visuals. Though I do feel that The Antenna had issues with pacing, having a tendency to linger on shots for too long, the lulls interspersed throughout the film are sufferable for the highs achieved in other parts. Overall, the film is interesting to look at visually and narratively its many metaphors create a sinister slurry of terror that engulfs much of the film’s cast. Directed by Orçun Behram, The Antenna is due to be released to US audiences on October 2nd, 2020.

MOVIE RATING — 6.5 out of 10