Mark Reviews Movies: MONOS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2019

With rare exception, children behave as they are taught. That's not just a matter of how they act. It's also one of attitude and personality. Everyone knows that if a parent teaches a child to be polite, that child will be polite in manner and word. For a long time, parents also have known that they lead their children by example. If a child sees a parent behaving or speaking in a certain way, the child will imitate that behavior. It is learned, whether or not a parent intended to teach it in first place.

The kids in Monos have been taught directly, and they have learned by example. They do not, as far as we can tell, have parents, either because those parents are dead or the children have been taken from their families. Their lives now are so far gone from whatever came before it that they do not even mention a mother, a father, a home before this one, or anything of the sort. They do have a parental figure, though: a mysterious man of diminutive stature. He shows up occasionally to the children's home on a mountaintop, where he puts them in formation, makes them run drills and exercises, and gives them his orders until his return.

They aren't his children. They are his "monos" (monkeys), his "soldiers," or his "commandoes." They are, above all else, his—and little more than animals or pawns in his mind. He does say one of the boys is like a son to him, but that's only when he's using that information as a way to express his disappointment in the boy. From what we see in the film, these kids have only known such things: routine, orders, disappointment, solitude, the threat of a court martial or worse, and the knowledge that violence or the threat of violence can get a person what he or she wants.

Co-writer/director Alejandro Landes provides no information about these kids, who are probably just teenagers, or their circumstances beyond the here and now. If they knew or experienced anything before becoming soldiers for an unspecified paramilitary army, such details have become irrelevant. It's unclear if they even know for what cause they are fighting.

The Messenger (Wilson Salazar), as their leader is called, mentions some ideology, although, once again, it's only used as a means to scold his soldiers. There is a battle unfolding, somewhere farther down the mountain, but in the here and now for these young soldiers, they only know waiting—for the moment that they'll have to do something important for an uncertain cause—and fear—not so much for fighting but for what their unseen leaders will do to them if they fail.

Right now, the child soldiers are in charge of an American hostage, a doctor named Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), and a milk cow. There are eight teenagers or children of younger ages at this base—derelict bunkers atop a tall mountain, where the clouds hover in the sky directly in front of them. All of them are armed with semi-automatic rifles. If they had actual names, the kids no longer use them. They go by nicknames, such as Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Bigfoot (Moisés Arias), Lady (Karen Quintero), and Wolf (Julián Giraldo).

Rambo becomes the most important of these soldiers from a narrative perspective, but Wolf is in charge when we first meet the group. He and Lady ask permission from the Messenger to enter into a partnership, because such are the seemingly arbitrary rules here.

By the end of this little episode, the cow is dead, shot by Dog (Paul Cubides) in a drunken celebration, and instead of facing the consequences for his failure of leadership, Wolf commits suicide. The remaining members of the outfit decide to lie—to blame it all on their dead comrade—in order to evade punishment. Bigfoot takes over leadership, and a battle erupts down the mountain, putting the base and the keeping of their hostage in jeopardy.

The film offers little by way of plot, instead observing how these kids have been transformed in ways so fundamental that they're barely children any longer. They play, yes, but with guns and the tormenting of their hostage, who tries to escape a few times in sequences that Landes follows as if it is the most important thing happening in this story. In a way, her escape attempts are, because they are a matter of survival and freedom.

These kids are just trying to survive, too, under the difficult conditions of the mountain and, later, a jungle (Landes and cinematographer Jasper Wolf capture the beauty and peril of these locales, mirroring the way that the children's innocence has been warped into something dangerous), as well as the tough and cruel leadership of the Messenger and his own commanders. As for their freedom, that becomes vital in the jungle, when the soldiers decide that they've had enough of the orders and the routines. They show their disapproval in the only way they have learned and been taught.

Landes and co-writer Alexis Dos Santos never lose track of the fact that these young soldiers are victims, capable of what they end up doing because that is all they know now. When they make their own little society, with its own rules and its own punishments, it is from the example set before them. When someone betrays the group, there is only one option left.

Monos is sparse in plot and character, but that is an important element of the film's impact. There is little left of these children, and we just have to watch as what little remains deteriorates even further.

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