Review: MONOLITH

We have our own stories and we like it that way. "I'll tell you a story," says a voice in the dark. It's a tale of a stalker. As the black screen slowly lightens to reveal the metal grid of a microphone's protective grill, another voice interrupts with a question. The first voice turns from an urgent confidence to an attack on the interloper and the story's credibility skids off the rails.

A young journalist, disgraced and outcast, has turned to podcasting to find a way back into the profession. She'd been loose with her fact checking in the rush to bring a criminal to justice. It backfired. The bad guy got away, aided by the case against her. So, now she must break a story that could transcend the popular medium and make her case irresistible. But podcasts are unregulated, true-crime might be fact checked but conspiracy-theories are left to grow wild. The form itself won't help her, she needs hard, substantial truth. But she's desperate and getting hounded by the boss of the syndicate she's signed up to, so she picks an anonymous email about a strange object with mysterious powers and follows it through.

And then she falls down the rabbit hole. I like this phrase. The further you go into the rabbit hole, the darker it will get and the loopier (I can never shake the association between rabbits and Alice in Wonderland). In the paranoia thrillers of the '70s like The Parallax View or The Conversation, the era of Vietnam and Watergate drove secrecy from above to the fore. The internet gave everyone a voice and the notion that all viewpoints were valid rose with instant global communication. Snopes' fact checking page grew to a reference source against this but began in the proto social media of Usenet (itself largely unregulated). By the time of 911 "truthers", Trumpian politics what was a babel of opinions became the sickening phrase the "post-truth" world. Add a world wide plague and physical isolation that ran on the internet and rumour becomes indistinguishable from news. That is the world of Monolith. It's also our own.

This might seem a lot to tackle for a little indy movie made on a pittance but there's been some clever thinking here. The journalist (not named in the credits nor, I only realise now, in the dialogue) is being hounded by the scandal she created so has fled her city flat to her parents' home in the country. On her quest to follow the story of the mysterious black bricks, she communicates with people world wide through the phone and online means, has to do a lot of problem solving remotely and even, at one point, receives a game changing piece of information in a physically delivered parcel: there's no virus but she's in lockdown.

This can only work if your central performance does. Lily Sullivan has to carry everything. We hear from other characters and see some in videos and photographs but they all interact with Sullivan and her responses. Whether she is using sly professionalism to coax information from media shy witnesses or raging to control the runaway train of information as it hurtles towards her, Sullivan's portrayal only falters when the writing does. This is a one hander and such lapses, forgivable on stage, can be glaring. However, the film always manages to regroup and carry on for its acceptable ninety-four minute run time. There is a major twist in the third act but it is delivered at the end of threads rather than in a big bamming revelation. We in the audience are asked to do some thinking for ourselves and the trust is warming.

While not without its flaws, Monolith is striking for a first feature and gives us a look into the fable making of  contemporary culture, suggesting that our ability to face the truth when we find it depends on the barriers we set against it and that the "alternative facts" we choose for our own comfort can only work if left unquestioned. Our increasingly scary world only seems to be comfortable when bolstered by wondrous technology but the truth of it might only be one glitch away from cataclysmic reality. There's a very practical reason that the journalist has based herself in the isolation of a stunningly opulent and isolated mansion but there is a thematic reason, too. That is, increasingly, the kind of shelter we will need if we don't start listening to the warnings, the inconvenient truths and lapping sea levels of the physical world. Monolith is post-truth horror.

Viewing notes: I missed this at MIFF but was pleased to see it (along with two others) screened at ACMI as a replay. It will start a short run at the Nova and Lido in Melbourne before (at an unspecified date) going to streaming (no word on which).