Worth: $13.50
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Cast:
Lily Sullivan, Erik Thomson (voice), Kate Box (voice), Terence Crawford (voice), Damon Herriman (voice), Ling Cooper Tang (voice)
Intro:
An absolutely jaw-droppingly committed performance from Lily Sullivan, who deftly carries the movie from the very first scene …
There’s something quite exciting about movies set in limited locations with a single cast member. They’re bloody hard to pull off, but when they work – as with Buried (2010), 127 Hours (2010) and Locke (2013) – they can absolutely blow an audience away. Monolith, a homegrown cerebral microbudget lo-fi sci-fi yarn from director Matt Vesely (check out his short films System Error and My Best Friend is Stuck on the Ceiling), is the latest example of the niche subgenre and though it stumbles along the way, there’s enough here to get excited about.
Monolith is the story of a woman known only as The Interviewer (Lily Sullivan), a disgraced journalist who, after a traumatic, potentially career-ending incident, is hosting a podcast about unsolved conundrums and supernatural events. Initially, she hates the gig and thinks it’s beneath her, but when an email from an anonymous source, clues her into the existence of a bizarre, black, brick-like object, things take a turn for the intriguing. The Interviewer soon descends into a rabbit hole of increasing strangeness and begins to unravel a mystery that may affect her in ways she couldn’t previously imagine.
As mentioned earlier, Monolith is shot in a fairly unique way. This lo-fi sci-fi thriller features one lead actress (who, happily, is excellent) and basically no other characters on screen. It’s essentially a one woman show with a plethora of voice performances to add dimension and depth. On paper this is a fascinating conceit, but in practice it makes the film feel a little inert at times. There’s a certain narrative unevenness, where the story goes from intriguing to dull and back again throughout the relatively short runtime. Also, you really begin to understand how important watching characters interacting physically is, to generating empathy and understanding, as the lack of this makes the film feel cold and emotionally distant. We are, after all, watching a woman put together a podcast, which isn’t necessarily the most dynamic of experiences.
Still, Monolith has a couple of things in its favour. An absolutely jaw-droppingly committed performance from Lily Sullivan, who deftly carries the movie from the very first scene, and a wonderfully clever third act reveal that turns the entire story on its head. For some people, these two elements will be enough to make Monolith’s slow building tension and ambiguous conclusion a feature rather than a bug. However, those looking for a more traditional sci-fi yarn, with clearer explanations and pat conclusions, may stare at Monolith like those monkeys from the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
