For about an hour or so, Scott Cooper’s Antlers lumbers around in front of your eyes. Set in the dry-ass mountains of Oregon, it slowly, almost despondently presents its creature-feature conflict: an antler-covered beast is on the loose, practically gutting people in the most gruesome of ways.

But, before we get to that, we have to deal with a lot of stuff involving awful fathers. As an elementary-school teacher who just moved back to town, Keri Russell’s Julia is all the way scarred by the things her dad did to her. She’s moved back into the family house, currently occupied by her brother Paul (the forever-reliable Jesse Plemons), the town sheriff who quietly takes opioids to kill the pain left by his old man.

In school, Julia immediately discovers a troubled kid in Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas, constantly looking like he needs a meal), who spends his days making disturbing illustrations and rounding up animal carcasses for his father (Scott Haze) and younger brother (Sawyer Jones). It turns out they’ve been “sick” ever since they came in contact with a many-antlered creature — while the old man was doing some meth-related activities in a mine — and the boy got both of them locked up in the attic.

Yes, Antlers is Cooper proving he can do some moody, monster stuff in the woods by adapting Nick Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy.” (Both Cooper and Antosca co-wrote the script with C. Henry Chaisson.) He does surround himself with people who are far more versed in the macabre: Guillermo del Toro and David S. Goyer both serve as producers, and he gets with German cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister (who worked on the AMC horror anthology series The Terror) in coming up with a striking, haunting shot or two. 

But let’s not forget this is still a Scott Cooper film, and his films often tend to be more about guilt than gore. Cooper’s characters are usually wandering around, victims of the violence past, brutish generations inflicted on them, trying not to choose violence their damn selves. So you definitely get more of that than the scary stuff you’re supposed to get. He even has that indigenous veteran Graham Greene show up as a former sheriff who breaks down to the siblings just what kind of savage beast they’re up against.

Cooper spends most of the movie making an allegory on how mining towns can permanently damage their townspeople, even those who don’t work in the mines. So, it’s kinda surprising when he gets into horror-maven mode in the last 20 to 25 minutes, and finally has the creature in question (who looks like another one of those bastardized animals from Annihilation) going HAM all over the place. 

As much as Scott Cooper wants to make Antlers a scary movie with all the familiar fixins (jump scares, overhead drone shots of cars alone on the highway, people making the dumbest decisions and eventually getting themselves killed), he Scott Coopers Antlers a bit too much to make it officially horrifying.

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“Antlers” is in theaters Friday.