Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.