A South by Southwest review
Cast:
Whitney Able as Samantha Wynden
Scoot McNairy as Andrew Kaulder
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Review:
A colleague and I played “_____ meets _____” mad libs for a good 15 minutes trying to figure out what sci-fi and horror predecessors added up to the new film Monsters, but the truth is that virtually any combination you could come up with still doesn’t do justice to the vision that Gareth Edwards’ feature directorial debut encompasses. A monster movie-cum-character study-cum-travelogue-cum-romance, the film points to forbears that include Cloverfield, Children of Men, The Mist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even Romancing the Stone among many others, but the inventiveness of Edwards’ storytelling, coupled with great, understated performances by Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, coalesces to create something entertaining, lyrical and most of all, unique.
McNairy (In Search of a Midnight Kiss) plays Andrew Kaulder, a photojournalist enlisted to babysit his high-powered boss’s daughter Samantha (Able) back to the U.S. after she is injured in Mexico. Because the country is effectively quarantined thanks to a mysterious outbreak of monstrous, alien invaders, crossing the border becomes increasingly complicated. But after Andrew and Samantha reluctantly agree to pay for an escort through the hazardous terrain of the infected zone, they quickly discover that their personal problems and ambitions matter infinitely less than the prospect of just plain surviving the journey.
Despite being shot on the kind of budget that understandably becomes fodder for underdog marketing campaigns and featuring special effects that Edwards did himself, there’s nothing that feels small or “indie” about Monsters, with the possible exception of the film’s occasionally-underwhelming human-to-monster ratio. Admittedly, the film is by no means a creaturefest, but the fact that the ones it does show are creepy and convincing reconfirms the moviemaking truth that quality is always a suitable (if not superior) substitute for quantity. Further, Edwards engineers his confrontations to maximize their visual and narrative impact rather than offer the fleeting thrill of empty spectacle, generating genuine, Spielbergian suspense without needing to interject cheap, provocative “money shots” of the monsters just to satisfy lowest-common-denominator gorehounds or fanboys.
But the real key to the overall film’s effectiveness isn’t Edwards’ effects work or even staging, both of which is terrific, but the authenticity of Monsters‘ two leads. Thankfully, McNairy and Able are both able to inject their characters with a depth and dimensionality that transcends expectations by a wide margin; although Edwards’ storytelling occasionally suggests that Andrew is a callous opportunist, McNairy reveals that he’s never an unscrupulous one, and Able finds the resilience beneath Samantha’s outward fragility, showing there’s much more going on inside the mind and heart of this heiress than the superficial desire to return to her cushy life at home. Meanwhile, Edwards populates supporting roles with authentic-looking and -sounding locals who are never oversimplified in the rural Mexican landscape, regardless whether the audience considers than facilitators or obstacles to completing Andrew and Sam’s journey.
Ultimately, Monsters feels a little bit like the end result of an adaptation of War of the Worlds that Steven Spielberg might have made back when he still had the limited resources and boundless inventiveness of his Jaws days: what it lacks in monetary muscle it more than makes up for in creativity. Does that make Edwards the next Spielberg? Not necessarily. It’s certainly not new for an independent filmmaker to rely upon atmosphere and suspense rather than gore or spectacle because, quite frankly, those are easier things to achieve on a limited budget. But rather than simply recalling the plot particulars of one or the other films listed above, the really good thing about Monsters is that ultimately it’s a combination of the most effective qualities of all of those movies it evokes – namely, imagination, passion and skill – in order to create something moody, suspenseful, smart, and most of all, completely unique.
