The Monster

And Keeping Family Members In The Dark

Who is “The Monster”? Every once in a while, you get a movie that asks the audience some faux-profound question as to who we really are. Are we the baddies? Maybe we’re just trying to get through the day. It’s timeless and universal, and sure it may be obvious. But it’s something we have to keep reminding ourselves. Today, he is the monster. Tomorrow, it will be the Postmaster General. One day, it will be your own mother. One day, you might be a mother, and it will be you. You will be the monster.

“The Monster” is a minimalist horror film. The budget was reportedly $3 million, though it’s unclear why they spent $2 million of that on craft services, because the movie is set in an enclosed space with only two characters. That would be a young mother Kathy (Zoe Kazan) and her teenage daughter Lizzy (Ella Balentine). You get snippets of their normal suburban life through terse conversations, the familiar kind between an angry mother and her daughter, as well as a few phone calls. What can be surmised is that Kathy is separated from Lizzy’s father.

The movie very delicately challenges our own notions of men and women – if a movie shows a lone mother caring for a child and the father is unseen, then the father is demonized as a bad father, and we root for the young woman. This is complicated here by the daughter openly wishing she could stay with dad permanently. Kathy also has an alcoholic past, or perhaps an alcoholic present. With her hair-trigger temper and demeaning responses to her daughter’s taunts (naturally, because her daughter clearly wounds her verbally), Kathy gradually illustrates that she is far from the ideal mother.

The duo are on their way to see Dad – on one of those impossibly dark side-roads you see in movies and maybe sometimes in real life if you’re terrible at navigation – when there is an accident. An animal has been hit, and the car has withstood considerable damage. Kathy takes the brunt of the damage, and is stuck in the driver’s seat. This is a perfect set-up for Lizzy to become a woman, to seize the moment and rescue her mother – at least, in regards to a movie. In real life, like when we were all teenagers, Lizzy knows nothing, and Kathy is still running this ship, even though she may be bleeding out, even though she may have had something to drink, even though she’s deeply upset that something has gotten in the way of her temporarily ridding herself of her child so she can have peace and quiet. Kazan may always have that adorable kewpie face that allowed her to play ingenues for longer than you’d expect, but she’s a bitter young woman in this role. She plays this character not as some one-dimensional scold, but someone who learned to be who she is through generational programming, one trauma passed on to another, and so on.

I suppose I buried the lede a bit. The car didn’t hit an animal as much as it hit some sort of beast. The creature took a heavy hit from the car, but just as a tow truck driver has arrived, the beast has disappeared. Uh-oh. So begins a hide-and-stalk thriller where Kathy must protect her daughter from something with claws and fangs and heavily metaphorical portent. Not only is this a situation where she has to become a John McClane while stuck in the front seat and bleeding profusely, it’s also the moment where she can seize onto her maternal instincts to protect her uncooperative offspring from a menacing threat. There are only two male figures in this movie – the father’s a voice on the phone, and, well, don’t get attached to that tow truck driver (heh, attached). So it’s ladies for themselves in this case.

Yes, it’s an A24 movie, and yes, the ladies are fighting a form of generational trauma. But this is from Bryan Bertino, the director of “The Strangers”, a veteran at this sort of hack-and-slash stuff by now. The “message” of sorts doesn’t weigh down a pretty compact suspense thriller, a fight for survival against, and towards, the most basic elements. You could make this movie in the 1700’s, in a distant future, anywhere at any time and it works all the same. Much of that falls on Kazan, who has to play a young mother bitterly approaching middle age with the regrets of the past, a life wasted. It’s dynamic work, even considering perhaps she was a bit young for this part (31 during filming). Kazan has been around, stardom seems to have proven elusive for her, but you wouldn’t guess that from her performance here.

Every mother deserves to know how much they are suffering. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the policy of the Federal Bureau Of Prisons. Legislation is finally being pursued to let family members know if an inmate has endured hardship in matters of health and safety. You’d think it was mandatory, but the rules had previously been written to give a considerable amount of leeway towards those making those decisions. In other words, it was up to their discretion, which is code for “don’t bother”. Even the warden, ostensibly in charge of an inmate with poor health, has no need to accept accountability for injuries or even death on his watch.

When I endured a broken jaw in prison, they placed me in the SHU to wait for surgery. But no one told my family that, basically, my face was broken. I needed to write letters to tell people, which was difficult because the SHU takes their time before they let you have paper and pencils (no pens). The rules regarding that limitation always changed. My family began calling my unit team and the warden – they would only say the situation was “under investigation” and that I was in the SHU. And that was after repeated calls. The warden refused to take calls and then came to me to get them to stop making calls – “Your family is making this very difficult for you,” I was told. And when my counselor was caught in a lie while contradicting himself over the phone, a family member informed him the conversation was being recorded. In response, my counselor immediately hung up. Which was within his discretion, I suppose.