A friend of mine recommended that I check out this sci-fi indie drama Monolith. Given his interest for Movie which is quite similar to mine, I decided to give it a shot.
It wasn't bad after all.
A disgraced journalist turns to podcasting to salvage her career, before uncovering a strange artifact that she believes is evidence of an alien conspiracy and lies at the heart of her own story. If you happened to see Evil Dead Rise, Monolith stars Lily Sullivan, who played the sister Beth in that horror.
Now here, she plays the journalist embarking on a new career as a podcaster, and she chooses to tackle the topics of the bizarre and unexplained, including conspiracy theories and ideas that most people would find ludicrous. This is a sparse production. Sullivan is the only one who appears on camera, save for some free, facetime images. Guess that's the reason for the "mono" in the movie title.
It's also features a single location, which is the journalist's parents' home where she's currently staying. I'm sure from a financial perspective, this all helped to keep the cost down. But what it does for the story is add an intimate vibe that begins to feel smaller and invasive as the narrative progresses.
Even though this does have an indie vibe to it, it doesn't feature the usual art house gimmicks and traits that a lot of other indie's employ, and this doesn't feel experimental in its shot choices, or build a story that utilizes an extreme lack of dialogue. The way this is presented is more conventional than a film that chooses art over accessibility.
The color palette is gray and subdued, not quite mournful, but certainly mysterious and a bit depressed. And this ends up complimenting the story. Thanks to Sullivan's dour demeanor. She's obviously a little discouraged from the job troubles that we learn about in the opening sequence, but she's also skeptical and sarcastic, and it's almost like she's conflicted about the podcast theme, that it feels beneath her or is so out of the ordinary that it opposes her journalistic nature for truth.
Now, talking about the clues of this mystery, they're patiently doled out, little by little, with a lot
of vagueness. For me, it drew me in, resembling the pacing and the presentation of several mystery
podcasts that I've listened to before. But I can't see how this could annoy too. The amount of info that we get, it's scattered, and so shrouded in ambiguity, that it can
be frustrating not to have a steady flow of information.
I found the conversations that Sullivan has with her interview subjects to be increasingly
intense. As she gets more involved in the mystery, her excitement increases, creating this nervous
fervor in her body language, her speaking, and her mannerisms.
Sullivan translates these through the screen in relatable ways.
As she got frustrated or intrigued, I was experiencing those emotions too. My heart was racing to put together the puzzle that was playing out, and I'm happy that I didn't figure out the reveals until pretty much they were shown to us. And there's a lot of subtle clues throughout the conversations. But because there's sort of a secrecy inherent just to the stories that her interview subjects recount, you can't be distracted or not even paying attention while watching. And I understand how that also could be a challenge at times.
Now, while the film looks great, there's not much that happens in the way of action or even movement. We watch Sullivan in her home. She sits and edit the audio, look over notes, sometimes stare out the window into the vast field behind the house. And it's actually pretty mundane in terms of visual excitement, relying heavily on the dialogue to establish drive and then maintain any momentum, and for me it worked.
It wasn't a brilliant execution or one that's jaw-droppingly spectacular, but the premise is engaging, with information provided in small and disjointed chunks to keep the questions flowing. And as the film reaches its climax, the culmination of interviews and conversations work to bring about some tense and unsettled urgency. I wouldn't say the ending is rushed, but when things start to fall in line, it's a quick succession towards the end.
I appreciate how unnerved I was by the final sequence. There are actions that will make us guess at the outcomes, and even if you are confident in your solution, it could still be some room for doubt. But I get that this could be disappointing or at least aggravating too. The ambiguity though, it's part of the thrill as well as working to increase the anxiety. I do believe there was opportunity for some further development on a few of the key plot elements.
I sort of felt that Sullivan's podcast investigation seem odd and unique. With characteristics that get a bit of speculation, but because I was so into the story, I really wanted to learn more of the lore and then get further into that explanation. But we don't get that.
It would change the trajectory of the story a little bit I think, so I just had to resolve myself to the obscurity that we get with this item and the idea. There's also a rather large lack of final motivation, but not that we can't understand why something is happening at a base level, it's just the deeper reasoning, it isn't fleshed out.
The film's only 94 minutes long, and while some of it can be felt, thanks to the patient's storytelling, it's really an efficient use of time without fluff or extraneous story
inclusions. And even though the narrative could be linked in a bit to expand on the development, the tight and streamlined story does deliver mysterious and unsettling vibes.
If you enjoy atmospheric tenseness and don't mind very little in the way of visual stimuli. Monolith is a fun and engaging mystery with a surprising, if not idigmatic story. I'll rate the movie 7 out of ten.
