You’ve seen this tale before: a man or woman is accidentally transported through time and has a grand adventure in the past. That’s been a yarn at least as old as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and persists still on Starz’s Outlander with every new season. Yet these protagonists tend to share a common trait: they can fit into the past. But what if they could not? Or worse still, what if they could, but only in a specific, horrifying role? Antebellum seems to be going there as past and future merge—and that past is the slave-based economy of the American South.
In what appears to be an electrifying idea for a horror movie, Antebellum is the feature debut for writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. Featuring an impressive cast that includes Janelle Monáe, Kiersey Clemons, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, and Gabourey Sidibe, Antebellum is a potent time travel fantasy that takes a fresh look at an era often romanticised by a significant portion of Americans.
The official setup is that Monae’s Veronica is a successful author in 2020 America who finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality that is anything but a romantic flight of fancy. Apparently hopping between then and now, kind of like Midnight in Paris, she must uncover the mind-bending reason she is repeatedly sent to the past or forever become trapped in mid 19th century America where the Civil War is waging, and even if she survives that, Jim Crow is just around the corner…
The film is notably produced by Raymond Mansfield and Sean McKittrick, who between them worked on producing Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, as well as Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.
