Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Christina Ricci, Santino Barnard, Don Baldaramos, Colleen Camp, Lew Temple, Carol Anne Watts, Jennifer Novak Chun, Peter Hodge, Nick Vallelonga, Sally Elbert, Lola Grace, Rachael Edlow, Darin Cooper, Aimey Beer, Neraida Bega, Philip V. Bruenn, Matt Lovell, Nancy O’ Fallon, Chris Mullinax, Anjoum Agrama, Olivia Reid, Kathy Sue Holtorf.
The very act of being part of, or witnessing, a traumatic event is such that for those who live through it, the mind will do whatever it can to protect them from the images, the constant emotional distress that will creep into their lives when they least expect it, or the triggers that will accumulate and cause the brain to fracture, to cause a schism that will separate truth from fiction.
Until it happens to us, we should not, we must not, dare to suggest that the person whose mental health is under attack can be cured with simplistic platitudes. Just because it may make us uncomfortable, does not mean we have the right to inflict further damage upon a desperate and broken soul, that would indeed be Monstrous, it would be evil.
British fiction is replete with the scenario of the ‘mad woman’ in the attic, the literature offering that insists that women of a certain disposition are too fragile to cope with the results of their actions, or more likely that of being discarded by their husbands in favour of a younger bride; the romantic and gothic writers of their day have arguably a lot to answer for.
Yet the detail persists, and occasionally the vision of the writer will follow through to the occasion of illuminating the reader or the film lover of how even in the 20th Century a fracture will occur in the mind to where the only possible safety net is the past.
It is rare to see a film where a man will lose everything over the near death of a child, and perhaps that should be explored in depth, but in Carol Chrest’s Monstrous, what transpires is a beautifully set tragedy, part horror, part psychological fear, a vision of what lays beyond just out of sight, and in which the monster might turn out to be a saviour.
Even today, despite good intentions and scientific breakthroughs, the stigma of a mind that cannot cope with the reality of its situation will still have the uneducated, the superstitious, and religiously biased shirking back out of concern that the condition, albeit absolutely human, is somehow catching, as if carried by the wind, airborne, communicable and easily spread. It is in that the discourse and relationship between Christina Ricci as Laura, and Colleen Camp as the unhelpfully suspicious Mrs Langtree comes into its own. A conversation that becomes brittle the more Laura discovers about the strange house she has rented, and perhaps Mrs Langtree’s own sense of unease as her elderly husband readily defends his new tenant.
A film of noble intentions which fulfils the viewer’s needs to have a story in its genre not descend into cliches and worn out, despairing stereotypes. Monstrous throws more accuracy on the situation on those in mental distress than others, and for that is worth watching with a degree of fascination.
Ian D. Hall