Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) haven’t always seen eye to eye, historically, but when Beth has a problem, as she has at the beginning of the movie, she still comes back to Ellie – and Ellie’s kids Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). Right now, Ellie’s family has problems of their own, though: the father of the kids has left them, and the high rise they live in is going to be demolished in a month, with no new place to live on the horizon.

So the family reunion isn’t without its troubles. Troubles which will be rudely interrupted when an earthquake open ups a hidden bunker under the building and Danny grabs the grimoire stashed there in the hopes of selling it off to get everyone out of trouble. Soon deadites and fountains of blood will redecorate the building’s interior.

The new Evil Dead film is not at all the kind of film I’d have expected out of Lee Cronin. Where the director’s short films and his The Hole in the Ground are rather slow, cerebral and thoughtful, Evil Dead Rise is fast, bloody, and often wonderfully fucked up perfectly in keeping with the tradition of the franchise. Cronin turns out to be really good at this sort of thing, as well, timing shocks, freak-outs and nasty suspense masterfully, while keeping the characters interesting enough for him to be able to slow down strategically whenever necessary or useful to the film’s mood.

There are, of course, a lot of nods to the other films of the franchise here (there’s a particularly wonderful/creepy variant of the old “DEAD BY DAWN!”, turned into an actual chant here), but Cronin – who also scripted – also adds some flourishes of his own that manage to keep completely in the style of the series but also feel new and individual enough to move it forwards, in a much more organic way than the new Hellraiser tried and failed to do it. The final creature – to spoil that one would be a crime – is a great example for this. It’s certainly in the mind space Sam Raimi works in when doing horror, but it’s also something I really haven’t seen before, or indeed imagined to see in the fifth movie in a franchise that also already spawned a TV show.

For a movie that’s aiming for the mainstream, this can get surprisingly nasty – not just in the blood showers but also in its willingness to kill characters who would be taboo in most mass market fare, in its general sense of gruesomeness and in its sheer macabre visual imagination.

Between the crazy effects, the blood, and the horrific action, Cronin has also managed to include elements that resonate on a different level. Apart from being a movie about possession, blood and unpleasant transformations, this is also very much a film playing on a very basic human fear. To my eyes, it is not the “evil mother” thing certain people get so cranky about (because all mothers in real life are awesome I assume against better knowledge?) but rather the fear of your loved ones turning against you or changing beyond recognition, turning into monsters literal and metaphorical. There’s a certain perverse glee in the way Evil Dead Rise plays with this fear, first setting up family relations that are close but not too idyllic, and then destroying them in ways none of the characters deserve.

If you start thinking about it, Evil Dead Rise is really very dark indeed – it just puts this darkness into such a sweet mix of macabre and perversely fun carnage, not everyone watching will even notice that darkness.