Monolith – 2022

Monolith is a special movie. What’s special about it, among other things, is that there’s only one actor onscreen. Everything else is just voice-acting over the phone. There are other films like it of course. Films where we only see one actor or when the set is quite limited to one place. On the top of my head, I think of Buried where Ryan Reynold is buried alive and needs to find a way to get out of the coffin he’s trapped in. And there’s also Phonebooth where Colin Farrell is more or less inside a phonebooth all the time. I like that kind of premises. I like it when a movie is not made from the same mold as everything else. This makes it interesting and challenging for the director to keep us hooked the whole time.

I think that Matt Vesely pulls this off direction-wise. It’s very high tense and I want to find out what’s happening. I get small pieces of the puzzle but never enough to lay out the whole picture. At least not until the very end but more on that later.

Podcaster

We have this podcaster, portrayed by Lily Sullivan, who gets an anonymous email about a mysterious brick and the number to a person to call. She’s intrigued since she’s searching hard for a new story to talk about on the podcast. She’s an interesting character and we soon learn that she’s fallen out of grace due to an article she published without having enough solid evidence. She needs to redeem herself and uses this podcast to reach out. For me, who’s interested in the mysterious and unexplained, I find the podcast itself interesting. That is exactly what the podcast is all about. Unexplained mysterious things that sound too strange to be true.

She starts digging into the story and gathers clues from different sources. She feels she’s onto something and digs even deeper. We get to follow as she uncovers more and more about the brick. She gets contacts all over the world who also have received such a brick at one time or another. Some are just interested in what it is, while others warn her to pursue this any further. She hears tales of madness and visions. How people experience the smell of rotting flesh. The deeper she digs, the more convinced she becomes that there’s something otherworldly about these bricks. What do these people have in common? Why doesn’t anybody want to say where they got the brick?

Monolith

Monolith is the kind of movie that gives you something to think about. When it ends, it doesn’t just end. It leaves you with questions. This might be semantics but to me, a monolith suggests a rather big stone. Is the brick then itself a monolith? Are they part of something bigger? Why the smells and the visions? Visions that seem to be very real and reflect the people’s own life? Why are there unknown runes in some otherworldly language inside them? Where do they come from? Are they a metaphor for something?

If we really get all these questions answered? I really don’t know. The ending is quite open for interpretation. I think I found my answer to the mystery. Partly at least. But I’m still not sure that all the pieces add up. Some of it makes complete sense to me after watching it to the end. Other things I still wonder about. I think that is the strength of movies like this. We get to a conclusion but we can’t be sure that this is the conclusion your neighbour gets. We all interpret the signs differently and that’s what I like the most about it. If there’s not one solid answer, so much the better!