'Monolith' review: An eerie sci-fi that's a lesson in micro-budget film-making | 802RF26 | 2024-02-07 10:08:01
It virtually seems like a challenge: Can you make a function size film with just one on-screen actor, one location, and a price range of less than half one million?
Written by Lucy Campbell and shot by Matt Vesely, eerie sci-fi mystery Monolith exists inside these probably tough parameters. Virtually your complete film takes place in a contemporary, remoted home within the rolling Adelaide Hills, South Australia, following a disgraced journalist (Lily Sullivan) as she yarn-balls a weird international enigma for her new podcast series. The film might easily have been a dismally failed experiment, however Monolith's logistical restrictions truly assist it shine, including a claustrophobia and sense of realism that only heightens the core thriller.
What's Monolith about?
After being publicly accused of failing to examine her sources for a serious story, a discredited reporter retreats to her wealthy mother and father' nation house outdoors of Adelaide to work on a brand new podcast: Beyond Belief, a deep dive into unexplained mysteries. With the strain to find a story constructing, one abruptly lands in her inbox: a telephone quantity and an ambiguous "the reality will out" message.
Soon the journalist is on the path of a wierd phenomenon that appears to be occurring throughout the globe: weird black bricks that turn up in individuals's lives, often at a time of misery, and which include bizarre symbols inside them that aren't from any recognisable language.
The story itself is creepy sufficient, however when strange occurrences begin occurring within the protagonist's life, it becomes clear that there is more at play.
Monolith is a lesson in micro-budget film-making.
If it was straightforward to make a movie for less than AUD$500,000 (£258,000 / USD$330,000), everybody can be doing it, wouldn't they? The thing is, Monolith makes it look straightforward. Campbell's script utilises podcast interviews and tense telephone calls to add a sense of creepy realism, whereas Vesely adds in slow-moving cutaways to convey the interviewees' stories to life without the need for particular results.
Partway via I did marvel if the movie might have been a podcast — and it in all probability would have worked — but then we might lose out on the unsettling visuals, Sullivan's sensible lead performance, and the right filming location (critically, whoever found this glass-filled trendy house, surrounded by misty grey vistas, deserves an award of their own). Sullivan is on display for almost all of Monolith's 94-minute runtime, pacing anxiously between rooms like a prisoner, obsessively modifying audio information and gazing out on the hilly, gum tree-lined environment with the growing worry of a lady who feels noticed. Sullivan plays this position completely, with the layers of her character peeling again as the story progresses and her personal life intersects with the mystery she's exploring.
</div> Is Monolith's ending passable?
The tough thing about movies that ask massive questions is that you simply inevitably end up wanting an enormous reply. You need to know if the conspiracy is actual, or if something otherworldly exists, even if that's not the primary level of the movie. Monolith falls into this category, and its ending will subsequently divide individuals. With out going too far into spoiler territory there's an underlying ambiguity to the movie that doesn't disappear by the top credits. But arguably the story is as much about psychological illness, our pasts, and the devastating effect both this stuff can have on us in the present, as it is about the potential of an extraterrestrial conspiracy. The movie's ambiguous tone allows these themes to be explored simultaneously, and work in a darkish harmony together.
Finally, Monolith is a film of unease. It builds and builds and, like the protagonist's questions concerning the mysterious objects and her own past, it does not go away.
The best way to watch: Monolith is in theaters from Feb 16.
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