Monster

I recently watched the Indonesian film 🇮🇩 Monster (2023) on Netflix. The storyline follows two friends who are kidnapped after school, thrown into a trunk, and driven to a remote mountainside shack. One of the friends manages to escape, but instead of fleeing, she sneaks back into the house to try and rescue her friend from the monster...

Directed by Rako Prijanto (The Clerics), the film stars Marsha Timothy (The Raid 2), Alex Abbad (The Raid 2), Anantya Kirana (Beautiful Pain), and Sultan Hamonangan (Tira).

Monster is a film with a solid concept that could have been executed better. The opening does a great job of setting up the circumstances, with a strong atmosphere and minimal dialogue that suits the premise. However, while the setup is effective, the intensity is lacking. The horror and torture elements fall short, with a chainsaw sequence that could have been much more impactful. The storyline and conclusion are fairly straightforward and predictable.

In conclusion, Monster has a solid premise but stumbles in its execution. I would rate it a 5/10 and recommend it only with tempered expectations.

I enjoyed this movie for what it was it's kept me engaged and it was suspenseful. I don't think people can handle the lack of dialog but I thought the actor's performance was good I didn't have to have dialog to understand what was going on and enjoy the movie. The little girls is such a baddie! My only complaint was the music was a little misleading sometimes. Example sometime it sounded like someone was knocking on the door when they weren't, but over all it was a decent flick. If you like suspenseful movies I say give it a go, the jump scares were predictable if horror is you genre but overall fun watch.

The no dialogue thing is an interesting take that can work, but the show is the same thing over and over. The child is painted as both brave and smart yet also quite dumb, making quick moves at opportune times yet falling for silly things that would be way more intuitive in the first place. Maybe that was intentional? But it felt inconsistent and all the characters felt a bit basic and overly stereotypical.

But more importantly for almost the entire thing there is this terrible background feed of this sort of white noise highly degraded sound that comes in and out and it genuinely was terrible. Like gave me a headache and caused my to almost watch the film on mute terrible. I created this account literally to share that this sound ruined the movie. It goes on. The entire hour and a half. It's horrible.

I regret staying up late for this.

I regret staying up late for this.

I regret staying up late for this.

I hate that stupid sound.

I don't hate the idea of a film having no dialog. Monster is as simple as a concept as it gets, and realistically, dialog wouldn't be a major aspect of the story anyway. No, the biggest flaw with Monster isn't the LACK of sound, it's the EXCESS of sound.

I just saw Challengers and that was a movie where sound design and mixing were a major aspect of what made it great. This is an example of a movie where the sound design is truly awful. It was a droning, crackling score that initially had me wondering if my TV speakers were broken. (Thankfully, no...I moved to another TV to finish the movie and it was the same situation)

This droning score plays through the ENTIRETY of the movie and it's unbelievably annoying. Not to forget about the score, which is so melodramatic and intrusive that it veers into very corny territory. Music is so important because it can set or ruin a film's tone. Here, the over dramatic music and over use of a terrible score made this film feel cheaper than it needed to. The last time sound made me feel so negatively about a movie was probably Tenet.

As for non-auditory aspects, I think it's fair to warn people that Monster is a very dark movie that follows two children as they attempt to escape a child murderer. Given that...I do wish we did get SOME dialog. It's such a disturbing premise that some levity and humanity on screen would be welcome. Some explanation as to what's going on? What the larger story is here? Or even some of the motivations of the admittedly detestable adults we see in the film would add a layer of intrigue here aside from the relatively compact story we see on screen.

I generally like to support foreign films and go a bit easier on them, but I think Monster needed some tweaking to actually work. As of now, it's a forgettable and undercooked film.

I am a fan of the idea of having a film use no dialogue. (Characters only sometimes say the names of other characters, so at least the main actors are more likely to get fairly compensated as speaking parts.) I don't mind the campy fake blood as long as there is suspense and a good storyline. Cinematography definitely had good moments of creating suspense. Only twice in the film did I find myself in a moment that seemed laughable and took me out of my immersion. One was a "The Shinning" spoof of the "Here's Johnny" scene that played out impressively well, especially by a young child actress in the place of Duvall, but even in its abbreviated form, the scene is just too long to not be a bit dull and out-of-place. The other moment was when our main character stops herself from stealing some french-fries left behind by an antagonist and pouts. I can see how they intended to make this a moment of showing human-ness and generating pity for the child, but it instead came off as an out-of-place moment of levity. I can forgive those things however. The thing that really irked me was the stereotypes used to depict the "badguy" archtype; Joint-smoking, beer-drinking gamer playing violent MMO shooters late into the night, has long unkempt hair and a black baseball cap or hoody with open jacket and ripped jeans, sustaining on cup noodle and fast food, neglecting an otherwise gorgeous home that is taken for granted and absolutely infested with cockroaches. And let's not forget this is supposed to be a child predator. It's just hitting every checkmark for a bad stereotype. When we got our second villain in the story, things started to pick up with suspense.