Monos (2019)

There is a moment near the end of Monos, just as the film is starting to reach it's climax, where writer/director Alejandro Landes throws away any pretense and shows us that he is telling us a Lord of the Flies story. He puts a pig head on a spike and has it covered with flies. His version of this story, set in the modern context of Latin American civil unrest, is a powerful update of that morality tale, that examination of the dark side of human nature, as it doesn't separate its audience from its subject by putting them on a desert island, but setting it in a modern reality.

As a film, Landes has made a stunning work of art. Monos is gorgeous and painful. It wrecks you while it fills your eyes with the kinds of sights and sounds that impact you emotionally and aesthetically. Monos takes advantage of its beautiful setting and the stunning cast but it is Landes eye for capturing the colours and textures of the scene which truly makes Monos so riveting to watch.

Monos' story is one of true tragedy in the classic sense. Landes chooses not to dwell in the depths of that tragedy, often moving on quickly to the next chapter, and all of that makes it even more unsettling as we are left to deconstruct what we are experiencing. So we are left shell shocked, rocked by how astute Landes' look into how we can justify horrors and how separated we get from our ideals.

Monos will be one of the more challenging films you see this year and it is all the more reason to let it take you.

Monos
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Sofia Buenaventur
Director: Alejandro Landes
Writers: Alexis Dos Santos, Alejandro Landes