Mark Reviews Movies: MONSTROUS

Monstrous, Screen Media Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 12, 2022

Perspective matters in Monstrous, a domestic drama that's framed more as a horror story—although, in reality, it's neither of those things. If the horror elements of Carol Chrest's screenplay seem to be deflecting from the core of this tale, that's only a taste of how much of this movie is an act of deflection.

To avoid revealing the truth here, let's just accept what Chrest and director Chris Sivertson provide us as fact. The story revolves around Laura (Christina Ricci) and her son Cody (Santino Barbard), who leave Mesa, Arizona, in the middle of the night for a new life somewhere in California. Laura has rented a house in the middle of nowhere, sitting on the edge of a big pond.

A couple of details quickly become apparent. Laura is escaping her husband, and the firm suggestion is that he's abusive toward her, Cody, or both of them. She has told no one, save her mother, where she and her son are heading, and since the story is set at some point during the 1950s, the only communication that's possible from the outside world is a landline phone, which Laura ignores for a while whenever it rings.

She sends Cody to a local school during the day, while she constantly cleans the house with the radio playing the same advertisement for a fancy new dishwasher over and over again, until Laura has the entire pitch memorized. At night, with Cody "snug as a bug in a rug" in his bed, the mother lounges on the couch in her day dress watching the same commercial play again and again on the televsion.

Something else starts happening at night. Cody begins to see movement in the water of the pond, the shadow of some form just beneath the surface, and some darkened figure crawling upon the shore. The boy is convinced that it's a monster and that it's coming for him. Laura doesn't believe her son at first, but as the creature's approach also signals electrical interference in the house, she begins to suspect that something is definitely wrong.

Anyway, all of this is pretty standard-issue material, with the setting—explicitly harkening back to the monster feature of the period, before abandoning that idea entirely—and Ricci's performance—protective, obviously, but also somewhat emotionally and psychologically distant, on account of how much we know is going on her life—serving as the movie's only semi-unique features. The monster keeps getting closer and closer, in progression, to the land, the house, and the boy.

As Laura becomes more convinced of the monstrous threat, she shifts between trying to keep her son safe from it and, since there's no returning home for the two of them, attempting to keep him happy in this seemingly haunted place. At times, the creature or the ghost is the only thing that matters to this story, as its tentacles and tendrils reach out from its body and mouth to get hold of the boy or his mother, in generic sequences of suspense and, thanks to how darkly lit those scenes are, decent visual effects. At times, it's almost as if Chrest forgets about the monster entirely, as the movie focuses on Laura's trauma, the tenuous bond with a son who doesn't understand the need to move, and a mysterious past with a grandmother (played by Sally Elbert) who might have been involved in witchcraft or something like that.

Some of this is important to the bigger picture of the story being told—or, better, that's eventually revealed. A lot of it isn't and, ultimately, comes across as a series of distractions and ruses, meant to put us in a certain way of thinking about this tale and to cover up the true nature of this place, these characters, their relationship, and what is actually happening in the story. Even some of the elements and tricks that aren't an act of cheating (There seems to be a flaw in internal logic regarding when and with whom we see the monster, but in retrospect, the filmmakers might account for that) are cheating in that bigger picture. The whole movie is a cheat until the anti-climax of a climax, featuring some delayed exposition, arrives.

Without giving away the game, too much of what Monstrous establishes and develops about these characters and their situation no longer matters by the end of this story. With that being the case, there's also little reason to care about that underlying truth—although there's plenty of reason to be frustrated with the deceptions.

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