MONOLITH - Mark Reviews Movies

Monolith, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 15, 2024

At the beginning of Monolith, a woman sits alone in a spacious house, unsure of how to even start a project with a fast-approaching deadline. This woman, known only as the Interviewer and played by Lily Sullivan, is a disgraced journalist, now entering the world of podcasting and assigned a show that will delve into inexplicable mysteries. She hates it. It's work, though, and work isn't exactly presenting itself to her at the moment.

Director Matt Vesely's debut feature is an intriguing stylistic experiment of sorts. The screenplay by Lucy Campbell features only one character who appears on screen, and the story unfolds through a series of phone conversations, photos, notes, data sheets, digital scans, web pages, videos, and other assorted pieces of research materials. This is a movie devoted to and revolving around the process of investigation, and there are multiple scenes that play either in relative silence, as the protagonist checks and re-checks and compares various items of evidence, or as a kind of radio drama, in which only the voices matter.

It's an interesting approach that directly reflects the work on display, but the more engaging element of the movie is how suited to suspense this minimalistic execution becomes. What are we looking at? Why does that seemingly random shape look slightly familiar? How come the person on the other end of the line seems so evasive or speaks as if holding some secret knowledge? Who has sent the Interviewer a package filled with clues in an unmarked box, and how does that person even know where she's living at the moment?

In other words, Vesely uses the nature of the Interviewer's job as a means of creating an atmosphere of isolation, loneliness, and increasing paranoia. The camera rarely leaves this character and only slightly less rarely leaves the interior of this house. She is boxed in, alone, stuck in place on every imaginable level, and exposed to something she cannot comprehend, as well as a group of people who might know more than she does and, in some cases, don't want her to continue looking into this mystery.

As it turns out, the nature of that mystery is both an initial strength and an unfortunate, fatal weakness to this story. It's far more interesting as a broad, enigmatic idea—a means of creating an eerie feeling and becoming an obsession for the main character. As it becomes clearer that Campbell has a specific notion in mind for what the mystery is and what the specific object at its center can do, the illusion of uncertain and potentially sinister possibilities is broken, and we're left with answers that aren't nearly as unsettling as the questions.

The object is a brick. The Interviewer receives an anonymous email about it, pointing her in the direction of a woman named Floramae (voice of Ling Cooper Tang). When our woman calls the included phone number, Floramae is hesitant to talk about the brick at first, but eventually, she opens up with as much as she knows.

It's a black brick made of unknown material, and its origin is just as odd. It showed up one day at the home where Floramae worked as a maid, and after her employers took possession of it and fired her under suspicious circumstances, they sold the brick to an art dealer (voiced by Terence Crawford) in Germany. She never found out what it was or what its purpose might be.

The story becomes an overnight hit of a podcast episode, and soon enough, random people are emailing the Interviewer, claiming to have seen or to currently possess similar bricks. None of them knows any more than Floramae, but everyone's convinced the bricks want something from the people who received them.

The particulars of this matter, of course, but they're meant to be a puzzle and aren't especially worth all the effort of gradually revealing the details, anyway. It's more tantalizing how Vesely uses the phone calls, especially the loaded pauses and silences when some discomforting idea is approached, to create tension. The camera lingers on the Interviewer's face or the audio data of her recordings to pull us into the words, the intonations, and the suggestions of some missing or hidden thoughts.

At times, the voice of an interviewee booms on the soundtrack, as the camera imagines the story of a slow walk toward some traumatic moment that served as a precursor to the brick's arrival. Often, the most frightening things are those invented by the mind, and the filmmakers here understand and exploit that. Even the basics of the execution here, which makes us observers of the Interviewer's process, insinuate the notion of voyeurism. We're watching, to be sure, but isn't it possible that someone else might be, too?

Monolith creates this discomforting mood and subtly puts forth these uneasy ideas, but unfortunately, they're all in service of a mystery that becomes blandly literal. The pieces fall easily into place, and secrets are revealed. The truth is right there, rather plainly and hidden by a bunch of contrivances, in front of us, but what unspoken, inscrutable terrors are lost as a result?

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