Monolith - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Monolith



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Art house films and micro budgeted films are extremely unique in the film world, and overall they appeal to a very minute audience in comparison to you average action or sci-fi, or even horror film. What makes them hard to pull off is that they rely nearly entirely on the mechanics of the script and the actors, forgoing massive budgets or huge drawing rooms of writers to fine tune and manipulate something for the average viewer. The end result is a film that can either be mind blowingly original and intriguing, or a jumbled mess that thinks itself smarter than the people watching (most of the time). Something which Monolith straddles the line between both worlds, allowing the audience to choose for themselves how they would rate it (ironically, something that is mirrored in the tale itself).

Monolith is basically a one person show with Lilly Sullivan playing our main character in the form of Lucy Campbell, a disgraced journalist who is shunned after it comes to light that she didn’t vet a source well enough and nearly slandered someone. Now Lucy has gone back to her well to do parent’s estate to recoup and recreate her life in the form of a podcast (oh boy, everyone and their podcasts these days). Things are looking rather grim for her future in journalism until she gets an anonymous tip regarding a mysterious black brick and the woman who once owned it. Checking up on the woman (Named Floramae) Lucy soon finds out that this brick is more than just a delusion of a mad woman. It contains symbols not of this Earth, and with some effort, Lucy is able to find others who have come across these bricks before.

While it may seem absolutely BONKERS that Lucy believes these people, things start to come together when it turns out that she has encountered one of those bricks before, and recognizes the dark power that these object seem to possess. Looking for answers to this all, Lucy begins a journey of discovery that will either over whelm her with it’s truth, or destroy her in the process.

What really happens in Monolith? That’s really the question that we should be asking ourselves. The one woman acted film (well that we can see, the rest of the people in the film are simply callers over the phone) is a puzzle box of mysteries, feeding the audience enough clues to keep them intrigued, while walking a meticulous tight rope between two sides of thought. The first is that this is an alien force. Something that is from another world with an unknown agenda, and an unknown danger to humanity. The Brick itself seems to be part government conspiracy, part alien, and harbringer of mysterious maladies and deaths. I mean, the bricks themselves seem to be pretty real. Floramae has one, a German doctor has one, each has diagrams and a history of being found the world over, AND there are hints at them being an Alien influence with various clues over the course of the film.
The other side of the coin is that the bricks are simply a visual aid for mental illness. Lucy very well could be losing it after her fall from grace in the journalistic world, and the brick is a symbol of her spiral out of sanity. Something that the film also hints at quite heavily, and sort of intimates with the final 15 minutes of the movie when she pukes up a brick, and said brick morphs into a doppleganger of herself that she has to fight to the death.

In this sort of odd “choose your own adventure” take on the narrative, we get two completely different tales here that we can choose at our own discretion. The bricks and their story very well may be a real thing on Earth and they could be Alien in origin. OR Lucy is suffering from mental illness and the entire thing is an art house visual on her cognitive and emotional decline over the 94 minute film. Who knows? The director seems content to let the audience choose their own ending from the puzzle box film, and according to the commentary, there really is no definitive conclusion to the story by the writers and director’s themselves.




Rating:

Rated R for Language




Video:

Like usual, I couldn’t find any definitive information on the shooting style of the film, and what cameras and resolution were used to finalize the flick, but from what little I could dredge up it appears that it was shot using some form of the Arri Alexa digital cameras. Past that, I ran into a dead end. That being said, the film itself is a heavily stylized shoot, with a rather gauzy and dreamlike haze over the entire production. Colors are desaturated and dulled, giving everything an overly blue tinge that sometimes shifts to amber when dealing with interior lighting. Fine details appear to be great for the most part, but I noticed some shots where black levels suffered a bit, or something was a BIT soft thanks to the very unique colors and grading used on the image. A little bit of banding here and there, but overall a very satisfactory 2.00:1 AVC encode.









Audio:

The 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio mix is easily the best part of the entire Blu-ray package. The enigmatic and somber sounding mix is heavily immersive with a great sense of surround ambiance, ranging from the tense string based score, to the creaks groans and moans of the great house reverberating in the surround channels. At first I wasn’t too overly impressed with the bass, but after about the 30 minute mark when things start getting “weird”, the LFE channel takes off BIG time. Huge hallucinogenic thumps augment the score, as does some really creative use of ambiance in the surround channels. The razor sharp vocals are locked up front and center like expected, and the overall dynamic range is pretty wide as the film shifts from heavy thumps and bumps to whisper quiet dialog at the drop of a hat.












Extras:

• Exclusive audio commentary by the director, writer and producer of Monolith
• Behind the scenes featurette
• Theatrical trailer

Final Score:
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Maybe I’m getting old, but puzzle box films with a “choose your own ending” narrative are becoming less and less appealing to me over time. I love the mystery aspect of the story, and audiences don’t need to be force fed a particular ending, but I felt a little frustrated with Monolith at times. It tries to be so mysterious that there is no way to actually have a definitive answer with what happened, and while that may seem really fascinating and “eclectic” to some, it leaves a lot of people wondering just what the heck they just watched? On one hand Lilly Sullivan did a bang up job of playing the very frayed and deteriorating Lucy, but the lack of any real conclusion (the director themselves confirm that it was meant to be inconclusive) feels like a bit of a cop out. As I said, maybe I’m changing as I get older, but these art house mystery puzzle box films feel incomplete, and Monolith (despite some very solid twists and turns) has that as a major weakness. Fascinating watch with a good Blu-ray release, but definitely for a niche audience in my opinion.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Lily Sullivan, Ling Cooper Tang, Ansuya Nathan, Erick Thomson
Directed by: Matt Vesely
Written by: Lucy Campbell
Aspect Ratio: 2.00:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DD 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: R
Runtime: 94 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: April 23rd, 2024

Recommendation: Interesting Watch