The Monster: Not Mad, Just Disappointed

Monsters are a tough proposition to pull off in scary movies. I think this is mostly because it’s tough to make a convincing-looking monster on the sort of budgets most horror films are working with, and no matter how well you sort of tease the monster by giving the audience brief glimpses, at some point you’re going to have to reveal it, and even if you’ve done your job well (or maybe even especially if you’ve done your job well), the reveal is going to be disappointing compared to what the audience has imagined for themselves. You can’t not show the monster (well, you can, but that’s even harder to do well), but audiences are going to come up with things that would have never occurred to the filmmakers, and so what the filmmakers come up with tends to be a letdown by comparison.

And yeah, that’s pretty much what happens with The Monster, both in terms of the titular monster and in terms of where the story goes. Don’t get me wrong, this is generally a well-crafted movie, but I think the skill exhibited got me expecting more than it was able to deliver.

We start with kind of a trite speech about how we tell kids monsters aren’t real, but they are, but this shifts quickly to a day in the life of a young girl named Lizzy. Lizzy’s maybe 11 years old or so, and we meet her doing chores around a dim, musty house - washing a stack of dishes, emptying ashtrays, clearing all of the empty liquor bottles off the coffee table in the living room, all while her mother Kathy is passed out in bed. Lizzy goes in to wake Kathy up at 10am. She was supposed to be up at 9am to drive Lizzy to stay with her father. And now it’s 10. Lizzy’s already packed. Kathy is petulant, Lizzy firm and persistent, their roles thoroughly reversed. It’s immediately clear that Lizzy is used to being let down by her mother, that this has played out many times before. We next see Lizzy sitting on the couch in the living room, her mother coming in and halfheartedly apologizing for falling back asleep. The clock reads 3pm.

The car ride is, of course, strained. It isn’t made explicit, but you get the sense that Lizzy is going to stay with her father and that the relocation will be permanent. She’s sullen, wounded, and not at all receptive to her mother’s sporadic attempts to connect or show affection. She’s over it, grown up too quickly as a result of constant disappointment. And then, distracted, Kathy hits something in the road hard enough to send the car into a tailspin. When the car finally stops and they catch their breath, they see a badly injured wolf lying in the middle of the road. But when Kathy looks at the wolf, she sees injuries that wouldn’t have been made by a car. And their car took a lot more damage than it should have for something the size of a large dog.

It’s as if both the wolf and the car had tangled with something much, much bigger.

And so Lizzy and Kathy are stranded on a rural road, in the middle of the night, as rain pelts down. Nothing but woods on either side, and deserted road behind and ahead. And there is definitely something out there. The rest of the film makes use of flashbacks to bounces back and forth between the present and the past, showing us snatches from Kathy and Lizzy’s life together before this point, although I’m not sure how important or revelatory the flashbacks end up being. We see why Lizzy is so unhappy with her mother (Kathy veers between needy and absent and her boyfriend is an abusive prick), but it sort of feels disconnected from the story as a whole. We get just as good a sense of their dynamic from the opening scene of the film as we do from the flashbacks, and except for a specific exchange between the two that opens the movie, re-contextualized at the end, it’s hard to see exactly why all of the history between them is important for the story. Lizzy is very much the parent here, she’s had to grow up fast in order to take care of her mother, whose alcoholism makes her basically the child, but once the car crashes that dynamic recedes except for some very specific quirks of behavior that don’t really seem to affect anything. Mostly it’s handled well, although some of Lizzy’s dialogue is maybe a little too precocious, at times - there’s a difference between a child forced to take on the role of an adult and a child who sounds like an adult, and occasionally it tips too far into the latter. Although the mother/daughter dynamic is generally well-done and surprisingly unflinching, it generally seems more like a glimpse into a different movie than an integral part of the one we’re watching.

And the one we’re watching is, likewise, generally very well-made. This is a small-scale siege movie, similar in its most basic structure to something like Stephen King’s Cujo - they’re relatively safe in their car, but something’s out there in the dark that’s waiting for them, and though help is on the way, it isn’t here yet. And so for most of its run time,  the filmmakers do a good job of keeping things tense through gradual escalation, starting with small things and very quick glimpses of the titular monster, largely black, glistening, and indistinct, with things getting much worse as the film goes on. It’s hard not to see some of what’s coming - when the tow truck driver shows up, you know he’s going to get it, and when the ambulance shows up, you know that they're going to get it too, but it’s largely staged well and effectively, so even if you can anticipate a particular beat, it’s still startling when it comes. The violence done to the monster’s victims isn’t gratuitous or trivialized - it really does feel like these are real people meeting a very bad end. But again, the skill with which it’s presented was offset for me by it not going anywhere especially surprising, and the final confrontation is as stock as it gets. And yes, the longer the monster is onscreen, the less it holds up. Early in, when it’s just something big, black, and glistening, it works. But you have to show the monster, and in the final act, its artificiality is clear.

I don’t know, maybe watching some really berserk shit like Ari Aster’s films has set my bar kind of high, because both Hereditary and Midsommar presented painfully compelling stories of failing human relationships and made them essential to the horror that followed, bringing a strong tragic element to the table to both films’ credit. I don’t know that the filmmakers here hit quite that level, but both the horror elements and human relationship elements here were absolutely well-done (maybe a little clichéd here and there but certainly not enough to be off-putting), but they never really connected, nor did either piece go anywhere new or unexpected. Like with any monster film, what I was given was never going to be better than what I imagined. It wasn’t actively bad by any means, but it could have been more. It’s the classic parent line to their child: “I’m not mad, just disappointed.”

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix