Mark Reviews Movies: MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

It's tough to predict where writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour's Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is going. It begins almost as a horror story, in which a young woman with telekinetic powers escapes via some violence from a maximum-security psychiatric facility, but then, it becomes something far more reserved and nearly down-to-earth. That's not praise, though. It's merely a broad description of a movie that knows what it's doing tonally but, ultimately, doesn't have much to say beneath that trickery.

Most of the issue arises from the lead character, the eponymous Mona Lisa Lee, played by the Korean actress Jun Jong-seo in a quiet performance that thoughtfully suggests curiosity more than anything angry or outright cruel. The character is the central point of Amirpour's constantly shifting tale, even though it features a couple more famous and recognizable actors in supporting roles. Mona Lisa starts this story as a gimmick, but once the filmmaker's ambitions go beyond what seems to be a pretty familiar story about the hunt for some mysterious person with supernatural abilities, Amirpour seems to lose interest in both the main character's own evolution and her purpose within this story.

It starts with some chilling promise, at least, as Mona Lisa, who has been locked up and existing in a catatonic state in that facility for a dozen years, awakens as a nurse is a bit too rough in clipping her toenails. The young woman, restrained in a straightjacket, stares into the eyes of the abusive caretaker, and with some moves of her head, she makes the nurse repeatedly stab herself in the thigh and untie the prisoner from the jacket. The same goes for an orderly behind a desk, whom Mona Lisa manipulates into knocking himself unconscious. She's free, and with that, she heads toward nearby New Orleans.

The other major characters are Harold (Craig Robinson), a local police officer who shoots himself in the knee under Mona Lisa's hypnotic influence when he tries to detain her, and Bonnie (Kate Hudson), a stripper at a club on Bourbon Street whom the escaped patient rescues from a fight (by making her opponent repeatedly hit herself). Harold wants to figure out who this young woman is, where she comes from, what kind of powers she actually possesses, and how to stop her from hurting anybody else. Bonnie sees a way to make some easy money—by manipulating this preternatural manipulator into making club customers tip the dancer all of their cash and getting people at ATMs to make withdrawals for her from their accounts.

Mona Lisa is no longer an apparent villain, to be sure, but the screenplay never determines what she could be beyond an inexplicable force, the target of a police hunt, and a pawn in Bonnie's scheming ways. There are hints about Mona Lisa's past when Harold looks into her file at the facility, learning she gained political asylum from North Korea as a child and was repeatedly denied foster services, but such information only affirms her status as a mysterious gimmick, a potential danger, and the victim of systems and people who don't care about her.

The rest of the story goes back and forth between Bonnie's money-making methods and Harold's attempts to track down the thieving pair. In between those story beats, Mona Lisa forms something of a friendship with Charlie (Evan Whitten), Bonnie's young son who is certain that his mother resents him. With a bit of the kid's advice, she starts to see that Bonnie's relationship with her isn't as kind and reciprocal as the dancer insists it is.

For sure, there are things to admire here. They're mostly in how Amirpour (along with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski) captures the atmosphere of New Orleans, how relaxed the screenplay becomes in letting these characters exist mostly free of strict plotting when it frees itself of those early genre expectations, and how the underlying idea about controlling and using people is flipped on its head (The most powerful character here is rendered basically powerless by someone who has no powers beyond talking a good game and putting on a show of minor compassion).

Through it all, though, Mona Lisa seems like little more than a prop in Amirpour's elastic and unpredictable scheme of a plot. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon puts so much time and effort into giving everyone else in this story some purpose, but it's clear little thought has gone into providing the title character one of her own.

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