Colossal (2016)

Warning: I’m not going to spoil everything about the film, but some spoilage is inevitable in this case!

Writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has hit rock bottom in New York, suffering from an alcohol problem, a feeling of alienation, a bad relationship to a tool (Dan Stevens) and an aimlessness that is rather difficult not to confuse with self-destructiveness.

When she’s losing her job too, she moves back into the empty house in the small town where she grew up, which is sure to help with her depression. There, she reconnects with some of the guys – Gloria’s clearly not a woman with much time for other women – who never left, especially Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), now the owner of the local drinking dive.

All seems set for a very typical romantic comedy plot but things take a rather different turn when a giant monster appears in Seoul for a bit of city smashing. After some time, Gloria realizes something bizarre: the monster only appears when she is at the local playground at a very specific time in the morning, and it seems to mirror whatever she does there.

I am honestly confused by the very mixed reception Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal receives, because for me this is one of the best, most touching and most clever films of the last ten years – and that’s not just because there are giant monsters in it, though that certainly never hurt a film in my appreciation. Rather, I admire the way Vigalondo starts from this extremely typical romantic comedy set-up (including the casting of Anne Hathaway who becomes pretty damn impressive once the film stops pretending to be a romantic comedy) and goes in a very different direction.

In this context, the darkness the film reveals in a certain character works for me on many levels: there’s the simple shock thanks to Vigalondo’s execution of the twist, even mirroring the moments of denial Gloria goes through, the critique on the romantic comedy way of looking at characters, where everything potentially dark in a person is at best treated as a minor quirk, and the sense of betrayal of trust and violation that comes with all this for Gloria. The film also manages to not go too far in this regard; there might have been a temptation to go full on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the audience, but the amount of violence we get to see is perfectly measured to be just as effective and feels deeply disquieting in its context.

I also love how the fantastical and the quotidian intersect in the film, both containing an element of the horrific (Gloria’s monstrous projection really does kill people, after all) but both also grounded in the world as we know it. This isn’t a pure case of the fantastical as metaphor either, in fact, metaphor and the (fictionally) real mix in a way that can’t just be solved like an equation. That’s apparently not the sort of the solution the film is interested in. Instead, Vigalondo uses the fantastical as a way not just to get Gloria into trouble but also to get her out of it. The fantastical becomes a way towards empowerment once Gloria starts taking a degree of responsibility bordering on the heroic. Which, obviously, is very much a feminist turn on core values of the superhero narrative where with great power has to come…well, you know.

Yet the film is at the same time as it talks about rather serious elements of the (shittiest side of) the female experience and a half-metaphorical way to cope with it also just oh so very fun. I love the monster sequences, specifically because they are small-scale and personal, seen on television and heard through stompy monster effects put on scenes of Hathaway on a playground, suggesting another way for some giant monster movies to go.


Sometimes, you just gotta love a movie, and that’s how it is with Colossal and me.