Review | Netflix movie review: Monster – Indonesian horror thriller goes the A Quiet Place route but fails miserably
1/5 stars
The gimmick in Indonesian filmmaker Rako Prijanto’s new kidnap thriller Monster is that the characters do not speak – they all can, but are only permitted to do so by the film’s screenplay when calling out each other’s names.
For the rest of the film’s lean 84-minute runtime, they are restricted to uttering screams and breathless grunts, or simply scowling at one another, even when regular oral communication might mean the difference between life and death.
In Monster, however, it proves to be a constant narrative hindrance, derailing what might otherwise have been a promising escape film.
Monster’s pint-sized protagonist Alana, played by 13-year-old Anantya Kirana, is arguably the film’s strongest asset.
Alana and her friend Rabin (Sulthan Hamonangan) are abducted outside their school and taken to a remote house in the woods. While Rabin is shackled to the wall in an upstairs room, Alana quickly gives her captor, Jack (Alex Abbad), the slip, whereupon she stumbles upon the full extent of his house of horrors.
A camera set up in the bedroom hints at despicable abuse, while the body of another child is stashed under the bed. Alana can do little more than cower in fear as her kidnapper dismembers this earlier victim and hands off the organs to a waiting courier.
Evidently an equally unspeakable fate awaits her and Rabin, unless she can engineer a daring rescue. This challenge is further complicated by the arrival of Jack’s partner, played with gusto by an axe-wielding Marsha Timothy.
The adept cast and simple set-up suggest that Monster should be considerably better than the final result, which proves by turns contrived, implausible, exasperating, and palpably ridiculous.
Alim Sudio’s screenplay ties itself in knots to ensure its characters remain mute throughout, while deftly eluding logic at every turn, and, somewhat bizarrely, doffing its cap to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining on more than one occasion.
Rather than exploit the economy of its premise for a no-nonsense run-and-hide potboiler, Monster swings for something far more innovative, and in doing so, stumbles and falls squarely upon its own upturned blade.
Monster will start streaming on Netflix on May 16.
