Monstrous (2020)

Warning: there will be spoilers, because the film’s virtues demand them!

The best friend of Sylvia (Anna Shields, who also wrote the script) and Jamie (Grant Schumacher) has disappeared without a trace somewhere in Bigfoot county in the Adirondacks. Her last human contact was a local woman she did ride sharing with, Alex (Rachel Finninger).

Dissatisfied with a police investigation going nowhere, and slowly too, Jamie talks Sylvia into checking out Alex themselves by doing a fake rideshare through a couple of states with her, undercover so to speak. But when the day comes, Jamie is a no-show on account of a stomach bug. Sylvia, driven by deeply ingrained feelings of guilt for the long ago death of her sister and the kind of loneliness that can convince you to do particularly stupid things, decides to go through with the plan anyway.

When her amateur snooping goes badly, she decides to distract Alex with sex, an attempt that turns into real attraction – so much so, that Sylvia eventually tells Alex the truth. The thing is, something is really rather off with Alex (capably suggested by Finninger without laying things on too thick), and Sylvia just might drive into a situation she can only survive with quite a bit of luck as well as her hidden inner strengths.

As I warned, spoilers ahoy: even though it is marketed as a bigfoot movie, this is really a film about a woman’s encounter with a serial killer that just happens to also include (a) bigfoot. Everyone’s favourite cryptid plays more of the role of a plot wildcard than the lead you’d expect going in. As a matter of personals taste, and thanks to the amount of self-satisfied serial killer movies around, I usually find bigfoot slightly more interesting than yet another serial killer (even if it is a female one for once), but Shields’s script and Bruce Wemple’s atmospheric and actor-friendly direction really do wonders with this thing.

The film’s not just having rather a lot of ideas about the nature of the monstrous (as the title promises), it also draws the viewer in as a layered portrayal of a young woman and her baggage. Alex and the bigfoot are really there to drag Sylvia’s loneliness and her internal damage out into the open so that the film can explore them. Thanks to great work by Shields in both of her roles as actress and writer, the film lacks the cruel undertone films all about stripping characters of their armour can have, treating Sylvia with warmth and empathy, while still being honest about her weaknesses.

Which of course also turns her into someone very easy to root for, even more so when she repeatedly risks her own life for someone else as a matter-of-fact impulse only in part explained by her past guilt, telling a counter tale to the more cynical world view that says only following our least humane impulses lets us survive, or as I like to call it, in memory of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, the asshole equations.

Even though Monstrous’s emphasis really is on being a character portray of Sylvia, it does do rather well as a horror film, too, deftly staging some classic-style thriller sequences, and even finding space for a silly head squashing by bigfoot. The bigfoot costume for its part isn’t terribly good, but Wemple mostly films around it, letting it loom in the background or in the blurred, liminal, corners of the screen, only showing off how unsatisfying the thing looks when it can’t reasonably be avoided anymore. Which, happily, is also the point in the movie when the quality of the bigfoot costume can’t really drag the much higher quality of everything surrounding it down.


If I was looking to nitpick, I’d probably leave the poor monster costume alone anyway and aim for the film’s final ten minutes when things simply become a bit too much HORROR MOVIE (imagine a creepy clown shouting that from the bushes in your direction), which does distract from an otherwise flawlessly staged and structured film. But these really are minor flaws, unable to do more than chip Monstrous’s armour a little. Call it battle scars.