Review: Slavery-focused 'Antebellum' is as gory as a horror movie, but without any of the thrills

“Antebellum” is being marketed as a thriller, even a horror movie — and while it has enough gore to qualify for the latter, it’s too sluggish to generate any real thrills as it deploys shlock effects to make its points about racism past and present.

The movie begins with a long tracking shot — an opening bit of showing off by the writing-directing team of Gerald Bush and Christopher Renz — from a Southern plantation’s front steps, through a Confederate military courtyard, to a cotton field where slaves are laboring under a hot sun and cruel overseers. The camera lands on the face of Eden (Janelle Monáe), who knows she doesn’t belong here.

Bush and Renz, music-video directors working here on their first feature, show more horrors inflicted on Eden. She’s beaten for not giving her name to her tormenter, a man in a Confederate officer’s uniform (played by Eric Lange), whose face the audience doesn’t see clearly at first. Eden is also burned with a branding iron, and regularly raped by the officer.

When a new Black woman (Kiersey Clemons) arrives at the plantation, Eden is quick to tell her to be silent, for her own good. But the warnings aren’t enough when the woman, Julia, attempts an escape and is brutally brought back to the compound.

After 38 minutes of Eden’s painful, seemingly hopeless plight, the movie changes abruptly. We cut to the present day, and a rich, successful woman, Veronica, preparing for a business trip to New Orleans, to promote her book, a Black feminist manifesto. Veronica has a loving husband (Marque Richardson) and cute-as-a-button daughter (London Boyce), and is enough of a success that she’s debating old white men on cable news and turning down a job offer from a Southern-accented corporate headhunter (Jena Malone).

Veronica is also played by Janelle Monáe, and we’re supposed to wonder what her connection is to the enslaved Eden. But there’s not much to wonder about, even if one hasn’t seen any of the movie’s advertising — or has never seen an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

The lack of suspense in that central “twist” is what ultimately destroys our interest in “Antebellum,” along with the filmmakers’ creepy attempts at detailing the atrocities afflicted on African Americans in the pre-Civil War South.

It’s too bad, because underneath the faux-Scarlett O’Hara production design and horrific scenes of violence, there is some interesting commentary contrasting the brutal treatment then with today’s racist microaggressions that bubble beneath a crust of etiquette. That attitude is best displayed in a delightful scene where Veronica is on the town with two friends, and one of them — played by Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) — raises a righteous objection to the bad table the maitre’d has offered these ladies, two of them Black.

But that’s one well-handled scene in a movie with a lot of mishandled moments. Monáe has been in so many well-made, message-forward movies in the last few years — “Harriet,” “Moonlight,” “Hidden Figures” — that her presence should be a guarantee of quality. In this, the makers of “Antebellum” have let her down, and the rest of us, too.

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‘Antebellum’

★★

Available starting Friday, September 18, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for disturbing violent content, language, and sexual references. Running time: 105 minutes.