Technology remains one of the most influential sources of horror, particularly as it continues to alter our everyday life. In Turkish director Orcun Behram’s dystopian horror film The Antenna, technology becomes a source of fear and tension as an apartment block is slowly consumed by the poisonous influence of the titular object.
The film opens with Mehmet (Ihsan Önal), a security guard/handyman as he readies for work, listening to radio reports about a government broadcast that is intended to reach millions of citizens. In the anonymous town in which the film is set, the landscape is a mix of undeveloped rocks and white uniform apartment complexes as far as the eye can see – a visual hint at the financial disparity of the region, as well as a contrast between landscape (the past) and progress (the modern world).
Mehmet is late to work, drawing the ire of his “by the book” boss, who has a literal direct line to the government and is obsessed with their midnight broadcast. In order to ensure that all of the citizens of the crumbling apartment complex can access the government-sponsored message, the antenna must be set up on the roof immediately.
Problems arise right from the start: the serviceman setting up the antenna suspiciously “slips” off the roof to his death in front of the building. It’s the first of many ominous signs that something is very wrong with the instrument and the forthcoming transmission; the danger is personified by a seemingly sentient thick black oil-like substance that leaks down the walls and into the apartment units. Contact with the goo results in madness, mutation or death.
Not unlike other apartment building horror (Shivers, High Rise), a substantial portion of the film’s run time is dedicated to the residents whose mundane lives are about to be turned upside down. They are a mix of stock character types: Firat (Enis Yildiz), a domineering father who lives with his meek, submissive wife and their adult daughter, Yasemin (Gül Arici) whom Mehmet offers to help escape, and a family with a young child under financial strain because the husband is unemployed, but too proud to ask for help. There’s also Cemile (Elif Cakman) a single attractive woman fretting about losing her looks, and Mehmet’s boss, who resolutely refuses to hear about building problems, even as the sludge ravages the air conditioning, locks doors and begins to cause mental and physical transformations that would make David Lynch and David Cronenberg proud.
While the impact of the antenna and its transmission provide much of the film’s nightmarish imagery, The Antenna’s visual aesthetic exists in service of a political message about the dangers of governmental control, propaganda, the monopolization of news, as well as the isolation of urban life in cookie-cutter cubes where everyone feels alone and invisible to neighbors. In a high rise, people may hear you scream, but they likely won’t care enough to investigate.
There is a lot going on in The Antenna – evident in both its ideas and its visual aesthetic. Alas, this is a case of a first-time feature director biting off more than he can chew; the nearly two-hour film is both too long and overstuffed. The budgetary constraints also mean that some of the more ambitious FX (thankfully all practical) mostly looks ok, but isn’t always great.
The low budget effects are perfectly serviceable compared to the film’s inability to make its point and end on a high. Behram is addressing an admirably complex and timely subject matter (particularly given Turkey’s history of charging journalists with terrorism offenses and jailing them – 175 in 2018 alone), but as the film drags on, his argument, unfortunately, becomes increasingly lost amidst the endless deluge of mind-numbing hallucinatory imagery. After a certain point, watching The Antenna starts to feel a bit like being beaten into submission.
It’s a shame because a tighter edit would have helped to make the fatalistic ending – with all of its horrific implications – that much more impactful. By the time the midnight transmission begins and all time stops, however, the audience may feel trapped in the same hypnotic loop as the characters…and not in a good way.
