Fear on the conscience – Newspaper Kommersant No. 159 (7360) of 08/31/2022

Chris Sivertson’s film “Monstrous” starring Christina Ricci is released. It is she who saves this modest example of genre cinema from becoming just another horror movie with a rather predictable twist, according to Yulia Shagelman.

Popular culture has long made it clear to its consumers that the American 1950s were not at all a serene era of solid prosperity, beautiful clothes and established social conventions that made life calm and safe. Already films of that time, such as the horror film The Thing from the Black Lagoon (1954), which the authors of The Beast directly quote, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), quite frankly hinted that all sorts of monsters were hidden behind the glossy facade in caramel tones. And for the filmmakers of subsequent generations, the mid-century setting, with its bright colors and sweet melodies, became the backdrop for depicting real, not metaphorical horrors – racism, sexism, homophobia, domestic violence, and so on.

Therefore, when we first see Laura Butler (Christina Ricci) on screen with a flawless, hair-to-hair hairdo, in a polka-dot puffy skirt and a cheerful yellow cardigan, we immediately begin to suspect that this woman, as if descended from the pages of a home economics magazine, nothing good awaits. But she doesn’t know it yet, so she puts her son Cody (Santino Barnard) in a sky-blue Chevy and hits the road to rock and roll. Laura and Cody move to California, where they live in a lovely white house, which has only two drawbacks: it is located far from the nearest town, so the small family is almost isolated here, and there is a lake behind the house, and, according to the boy, at night, a monster comes out of it, which wants to take it away. But my mother, of course, does not believe him, arguing that this is just a bad dream. For her, the real monster is an abusive ex-husband, from whom she fled to this outback. His calls on the yellow, cardigan-colored phone at first frighten her much more than any supernatural being, but she also has to get to know the latter better than she would like.

The whole situation around Laura, her impeccable outfits and the manner of communicating with her son give off some falsehood, but do not rush to blame the authors for their inability to reproduce the era on the screen: this artificiality actually serves as the key to the main plot secret. As well as the performance of Christina Ricci, which, together with the work of the cinematographer (Sand Bonnet) and production designer (Mars Fieri), basically keeps this unremarkable, but quite well tailored film. Even when Laura seems calm and collected at the beginning of the film, her gaze betrays an inner confusion, turning into panic in the course of the action. The CGI monster, but in the spirit of the aforementioned 50s horror movies with their funny handmade monsters, doesn’t look all that scary at all. However, thanks to Ricci, we believe that her character is really afraid of him. Her son, performed by Santino Barnard, in general, is no different from the pale and withdrawn children traditional for horror, to the great alarm of the parents who constantly draw creepy monsters instead of birds, flowers and the sun, but his older on-screen partner again makes both motherly love and Laura’s relationship with Cody is compelling.

It will probably not be difficult for viewers who have watched it to predict exactly where the film will turn in its last third, when it finally turns from a leisurely retro-horror movie into a drama. However, this shift in register looks like a logical and elegantly crafted continuation of the double bottom genre film tradition. And if the atmosphere of the picture right up to the very end seems not quite natural, then Laura, overcome by guilt, grief and fear, wants to really sympathize.