YMMV / Antebellum

• Anvilicious: There is no subtlety in the film whatsoever in its attack on ingrained white racism and the US South's worship of the Confederacy. One of the villains is even killed by having her head slammed against a statue of Robert E. Lee in possibly the heaviest anvil in the film.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Veronica and Eden are the same person and the movie is actually taking place in the 21st century. Part of this being obvious is due to the odd structuring of the plot: the movie's first act seemingly takes place on a 19th century American plantation, albeit with some increasingly noticeable anachronisms, notably ending with a cellphone ringing. Then the second act takes place in contemporary America and introduces us to activist Veronica, who is played by the same actress as Eden, and gets kidnapped by plantation owner Elizabeth (also played by the same actress), whereupon it switches back to the plantation for the third act. Unlike the trailer, there are no hints something supernatural or science fiction-y is going on like time travel, so the obvious conclusion is that Veronica's still in the 21st century and stuck in a twisted historical reenactment. The opening quote by William Faulkner ("The past is never dead. It's not even past.") is also a huge hint at the twist.
• Catharsis Factor: Given how vile they've been acting the whole movie, "Him", Daniel and his friend, and Elizabeth getting killed is definitely this. "Him" is burned along with the other two soldiers, and Elizabeth, who was the one who kidnapped Veronica in the first place, is lynched and dragged by a horse that Veronica was riding, until her head hits the foot of a statue.
• Complete Monster: Antebellum has these three racists:
  • Blake Denton, aka "the General" or "Him", is a Southern senator seeking to reestablish the Confederate way of life. Having black people kidnapped and made into slaves where they are beaten, molested and killed, Denton has the heroine Veronica Henley abducted and regularly rapes her as his personal slave, fueled by nothing more than racism and cruelty.
  • Elizabeth, Denton's daughter, is one of the chief figures of the "Plantation". Elizabeth is the one who selects the kidnapping victims, having them abducted to become slaves where they are tortured and stripped of all humanity, even implying at one point that she wishes to enslave Veronica's young daughter. After her father's death, Elizabeth tries to hunt Veronica down and murder her, gloating how she was the one who built the operation.
  • Captain Jasper, Elizabeth's husband, as much a racist thug as his father-in-law, runs the fields where he subjects slaves to the worst mistreatment and joyfully hunts down any escapees before murdering them and throwing the bodies in a crematorium. The one who helped kidnap Veronica, Jasper allows his men to beat and rape slaves at their leisure, all with the same sadistic enjoyment.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: There's a very good reason the movie's ending cuts off at the exact time it does. Veronica and the other freed kidnap victims are going to have a very hard time reintegrating into society and dealing with their trauma, especially when the legal ramifications are going to force it into their faces for likely years to come. Plus, she can probably give up any hope of being known for anything beyond being a victim of the plantation, with her activist work being at most a distant footnote to her reputation. And that brand isn't going away any time soon.
• Iron Woobie: Poor Eden/Veronica. She is taken from her wonderful life as a public speaker, forced to be a slave for a bunch of racist Confederate idolists, is branded, beaten up, and raped, and witnesses her friends' deaths. At least at the end, she overcomes the park and survives in a victorious ride on a horse with an axe.
• Narm: The film's refusal to break N-Word Privileges makes all of the scenes on the plantation have a heavy air of artificiality and awkwardness. Especially when it's revealed this is actually in the modern day, and the people running the place are the sort of racists who absolutely would use the word at every single opportunity - but it's never spoken once.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • A modern-day black female writer gets sucked back in time to an antebellum Southern plantation? That plot description could easily describe Octavia Butler's Kindred, only this version is done as a horror movie.
  • Less kindly, as an attempt to condemn the horrors of slavery that falls backwards into exploiting them, it can be seen as a modern Goodbye Uncle Tom.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
  • Many critics and viewers feel that the movie in some respects tried to repeat the magic of Get Out (2017) to at best, mixed results.
  • Others also criticized the predictable rehashing of the twist from The Village (2004).
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A frequent criticism of the film is that the first third largely consists of scene after scene of enslaved black people being abused, tortured and murdered by sadistic white supremacists (which continues into the final act to an extent). These scenes do little to develop the plot or characters, nor are they used to explore the subjects of racism and slavery in much depth beyond "it's terrible", so for some viewers it comes off as gratuitous. Most of the characters we sympathize with end up dead after being subjected to endless torment, with only Eden/Veronica gaining any sort of agency. By the time the movie starts getting into the actual plot, many viewers had already given up (not helping is that some viewers also found the main twist to be weakly written, so for them it wasn't even worth sitting through the gruelling first forty minutes).

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