Worth: $12.00
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Cast:
Jun Jong-seo, Kate Hudson, Craig Ferguson, Ed Skrein, Evan WhittenJun
Intro:
If approached with a willingness to overlook undercooked narrative for Southern-fried atmosphere, this may prove sufficient as a mood piece.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, the latest feature from genre alchemist Ana Lily Amirpour finds her digging further into a fascination with patriarchal power structures. As she chronicles the journey of Mona Lisa Lee (Burning’s Jun Jong-seo), an escapee from a mental institution who is gifted with mind control, we are shown a protagonist cut from the same cloth as the Girl from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Arlen from The Bad Batch: a woman stuck in a place where the dispossessed are all trying to exert some level of control over their surroundings, even if it means directly controlling others.
While this is a decent spin on that idea, thankfully avoiding the belaboured pacing of Bad Batch, it never rises much further than being just another instance of Amirpour’s filmmaking style.
Apart from a relatively shocking lack of skateboards, this has all the trappings of Amirpour’s body of work up to this point: a soundtrack full of bangers, a locale-centric sense of world-building in its depiction of moon-lit New Orleans, a cast full of oddball actors in equally oddball roles (it’s been a while since Ed Skrein has been given a character this likeable), and an array of cultural influences.
In conveying the sense of alienation that Mona Lisa goes through, trying to adapt to life on the outside and showing Amirpour’s characteristic disdain for bullies, there’s certainly a vibe to it. Notable is the decision to put Kate Hudson opposite a neurodivergent lead character in a film, which works out much better here than it did last time with Music.
The story keeps trying to lumber into frame, and along with it comes a nagging feeling that it should be making more of an impact. Through its different takes on that central theme of control structures – from law enforcement to immigration to mental healthcare to the strip clubs – not much actually gets said.
It comes across as incidental more times than not, as if these topics were being brought up not out of a direct want to comment on such things, but just because they were in proximity to the aesthetics Amirpour wanted to put on-screen. It’s sightseeing, but no ideas.
Aiming for mood over concrete theme would still have been fine, given Amirpour’s ability in that regard in the past, but even that shows diminishing returns here. Seeing Evan Whitten’s Charlie be a tiny one-man mosh pit is cute and all, but it pales in comparison to the moments of musical catharsis offered by AGWHAAN.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is pure style-over-substance, and not a particularly engaging example of it. If approached with a willingness to overlook undercooked narrative for Southern-fried atmosphere, this may prove sufficient as a mood piece. But as an extension of Ana Lily Amirpour’s idiosyncratic approach to feminist cinema, it’s a disappointingly hollow outing.
