Monolith (2022)

February 16, 2024 5:41 PM

A desperate young journalist turns to podcasting to salvage her career, but her rush to make headlines leads her to an alien conspiracy.

Or is it just all in her head?

Written by Lucy Campbell and directed by Matt Vesely. Lily Sullivan is the only person (overall) who appears on screen.

Digital rental currently.

posted by edencosmic (3 comments total)

I liked this and I think it's worth watching. It's not necessarily going to be a satisfying movie, though.

But I like these weird horror-adjacent movies that are more about mood and metaphor than they are about making sense. I'd rather people try for the weird thing and fail than do something obvious.

(There have been some complaints about why this wasn't just a podcast but I think it does use visuals in a great way. Also, I listened to too much of The Black Tapes to be happy this more or less resolved in 90ish minutes, even if it's imperfect.)
posted by edencosmic at 5:44 PM on February 16

I thought this was quite well-acted, for being basically a one-actor movie, and it touches on some themes I like a lot (doubles, unreliable memory, Pontypool-style mimetic shenanigans, etc). Once it got to the last act it was hard to see it as anything other than a metaphor for colonialism, though, and it started to seem a little didactic to me. I'm not sure whether that's the movie's fault or mine. Certainly things aren't spelled out in explicitly allegorical terms, I just had a sense that right when the weirdness ramped up plot-wise, a lot of the ambiguity collapsed theme-wise. I'd still recommend this to people interested in cerebral slow-burn films, though.
posted by whir at 10:04 PM on February 20

This is pretty good, but if you stripped all of the visuals away and made it a podcast, it might even work better. It's so heavily based around the audio, around conversations done remotely. No slight on the actors, who do good work. And the visuals are well done. But honestly, it's a podcast in a movie suit.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:00 AM on March 21