MONOS (2019) - Review
MONOS is a form of cinematic possession. Co-writer/Director Alejandro Landes' embeds the audience into his guerrilla unit of child rebels, stationed at the top of the world. In this isolation, these adolescents repress their blooming desire. They struggle with hair-trigger impulses and face into the struggle to maintain rational while flexing their position in their hierarchical pack. What's their purpose? Are we in a version of the world that we know? How were they recruited? These questions slip into your mind like unsuspecting whispers.
The opening of this Colombian production takes place on the mountaintop of the Chingaza páramo in Cundinamarca. This seemingly abandoned concrete fortifications, grafted to the side of the mountain carve a pathway through the clouds like a shark's fin emerging from the frothy surf. It makes you feel like you're not in this world.
In the blistering cold, the enveloping clouds, they stand guard. When we're introduced to the MONOS (or monkeys), they're drilled by their diminutive sergeant Mensajero (the chiselled Wilson Salazar). There's something hypnotic about the rhythm of their compliance. Their training isn't the clinical execution of movements by professionals; they're being driven to deliver. In their growing young bodies, some of the troupe bear the torture better than others. This test, part of a periodic "spot-check" occurs, and they're left back to their devices. It's not long before this band of adolescent soldiers test, push and burst through the boundaries of their station, dragging them from the blistering clarity of the world's canopy, into the dark jungle of the Samaná river canyon in Antioquia. Moral's slip, reptilian desires take over.
If one can ever believe anything on Wikipedia, film productions have avoided these locations because of the unpredictability of the extreme weather. Landes uses these extremes as ciphers for control. Concrete, wind chill - this tempers the Monos - keeping them on ice as it were. Add alcohol, a roaring blaze the warmth softens. The program slips. Add heat, steamy South American jungle humidity and that viral growth of adolescence blooms unabated. There aren't the barriers of nature or society on these Monos, and that's precisely the tension.
Landes allows the audience to sense more significant conflicts dwarfing the Monos' minor contribution. Alejandro Landes & Alexis Dos Santos use roar of adolescent social flexing in isolation, to demonstrate the real impact of their implosion on the broader objectives of a wider conflict.
Young performers Julian Giraldo plays Lobo - Wolf a lithe and downtrodden second in command snatches the opportunity to lead with harmful consequences. Giraldo even could be said to have the easy lope of a wolf. Karen Quintero plays Lady, becomes the group's object of affection and trophy. Quintero does a beautiful job of demonstrating the transition from playful coupling to pained servitude to the pack's leader. She conveys ongoing suffocation. The remainder of the outfit - Laura Castrillón's Sueca or Swede, Deiby Rueda's Pitufo or Smurf, Paul Cubides' Perro or Dog, Moises Arias' Patagrande or Bigfoot and Sneider Castro as Boom Boom - are incredible.
The character that I've been utterly unable to shake is the androgynous Rambo, played by Sofia Buenaventura. Caught in the middle of her burgeoning sexuality and on the fringes of the group; Rambo cannot uncouple from their moral compass.
Roger Ebert once said of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" that it "shames modern Hollywood's timidity." MONOS takes the audience into the extreme unseen. MONOS is bold, confronting and impossible to forget.
★★★★/★★★★
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=disclpVzoMQ&w=854&h=480]
