Director – Matt Vesely, Screenplay – Lucy Campbell, Producer – Bettina Hamilton, Photography – Michael Tessari, Music – Benjamin Speed, Visual Effects Supervisor – Carlo Andreacchio, Production Design – Jonah Booth-Remmers. Production Company – Black Cat White Rabbit Productions.
Cast
Lily Sullivan (The Interviewer). Voices – Terence Crawford (Klaus Lang), Ling Cooper Tang (Floramae King), Kate Box (Laura Sully), Brigid Zengeni (Shiloh Loudon), Ansuya Nathan (Paula), Erik Thomson (Dad), Chase Coleman (Tyler Brown), Damon Herriman (Jared)
Plot
A woman has been dismissed from her job as a journalist but continues with the Beyond Believable podcast, specialising in strange and unexplained phenomena. An email tipoff leads her to Floramae King who tells how she discovered a mysterious brick several years earlier when she was working as a housemaid to a family. The brick demonstrated unusual effects before it was taken away from Floramae by the family. This leads the woman to German art dealer Klaus Lang who bought the brick, along with collecting several others, and has had experienced unusual things too. As evidence is then delivered to the woman that her past is connected to the bricks, the obsession with the bricks takes her down a paranoid rabbit hole.
The title Monolith invariably creates association with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – a film that created such an iconic monolith that it fairly much branded the name. There had also been a shabby alien conspiracy film Monolith (1994) with the same title in the 1990s. However, as you watch Monolith, you realise that the title is a cheat as there is nothing in the film that is ever referred to as a monolith. There are black rectangular objects, although these are referred to as bricks and are only about the same size as a regular mortar brick, and you suspect that the title was one that was slapped on the film by the distributor.
It also quickly becomes apparent that Monolith is a one-person show. The only actor on screen for the entire film is Lily Sullivan, an Australian actress probably best known here for Evil Dead Rise (2023), who reacts to various others on the phone. I some misgivings about this as a dramatic gimmick – it makes Monolith a static film with one actor on a single set with only very occasional scenes where Lily ventures outside. Her only reactions are sitting talking to people on her podcast and the phone. This seems dramatically limiting – it is hard to engage with a film where the entire show is just people sitting and talking on a phone.
Certainly, there have been some other dramatic equivalents. One keeps trying to avoid comparisons to the dreadful Whoopi Goldberg film The Telephone (1987). There are better examples with Buried (2010), which had Ryan Reynolds locked in a coffin talking to others only by his cellphone, and in particular Locke (2014), which consisted of Tom Hardy talking on a cellphone while driving.
Lily Sullivan delves into unexplained phenomena as The Interviewer
The surprise is that, despite such misgivings, Monolith becomes a work where we become drawn into Lily Sullivan’s state of Paranoia and the mysteriously connected events surrounding the bricks and the influence they may have over the people that receive them, drawing them down into an obsession where enigmatic things start to happen. The film never deigns to really explain what the bricks are or where they come from – the most easily toyed explanation is that they are some type of Alien Artefact but nothing ever solidifies.
At one point, a giant brick is seen hovering in the sky above Lily Sullivan’s house and then just as mysteriously disappears, it never being seen or even commented on again. The film gets particularly creepy when [PLOT SPOILERS] Lily Sullivan receives a videotape showing herself receiving a brick at her own nine-year-old party. This all ties together with the stories of other recipients in ways that prove to hold some quite clever twists in the end of the tale.
Monolith was the first feature film from Matt Vesely, who had prior to this worked as a writer in Australian tv with shows such as Wasteland Panda (2012- ), This Week with Charlie Pickering (2015- ) and Aftertaste (2021-2), and the documentary Sam Klemke’s Time Machine (2015).
