While clearly not appreciated by everyone, I found Antrum incredibly effective.
I would start with the pitch-perfect performances of the two protagonists, played by Nicole Tompkins and Rowan Smyth. At times you forget you're watching a movie; you can tell the direction is very deliberate here as the script slithers along in an unorthodox and bizarre way, yet these two actors somehow manage to express exactly what you'd believe real people would at any given moment.
Secondly, the film is disorienting and oppressive. This is accomplished, first of all, by invading a "safe space" from demons, Satan, hell, and the occult: a sunny, almost idyllic forest. Usually, dark forces creep around in gothic mansions or dark forests after midnight, around bonfires.
Not so, here. Instead, the bad stuff happens mainly in broad daylight in an otherwise peaceful, appealing setting. The effect, therefore, is more unsettling because daylight and nice forests are supposed to be the respite between the periods of darkness where evil things rise and run amok in the shadows.
There is no respite here.
Further, the not-quite-subliminal frames inserted into the film really amplify matters, which brings me to the most important point:
If the filmmakers would have asked me my opinion of this, I would have advised them to ditch the concept of a "cursed film" leaving the middle part - the Antrum story itself - to speak for itself. It feels like the filmmakers started out with this idea of a cursed film, perhaps with the film's plot as a secondary concern, but in reality the film itself holds up well and exceeds expectations.
In particular, we're not 100% sure that what we're seeing is really happening, or whether the two characters have unwittingly created an egregore, in which a consensus hallucination of sort is occurring.
Had the filmmakers had a much larger budget, they might have been tempted to use CGI to represent actual supernatural elements, but, in particular, the chains dragging across the forest floor were somehow more horrifying than a full-bore representation of what was supposed to be pulling at those chains.
I might have even advised pulling back further to make this even more subtle. The real tension here is between what is real and what is imagined in the minds of the characters.
The metal baphomet is reminiscent of the wicker man, which I appreciated, and the way the film doesn't feel the need to explain the presence of that or the forest Hungarians who treat it as some kind of totem, is greatly appreciated. Any attempt to tie this film together with a grand explanation would have been far less satisfying.
Something is seriously wrong in this forest.
Lastly, there is the soundtrack, which must be fully heard to be believed. As with the deft editing, I kept wondering how the filmmakers figured out how to combine all of these things the way they did to create a deeply unsettling experience.
I am not sure why this is not rated higher. Viewed in the right state of mind, the film really breaks a lot of conventions.
I like it a whole lot. What starts as a film about tunnelling to hell morphs into folk horror, as the landscape - the sunny forest - becomes a character unto itself.
