Monos, Berlin Film Festival review: a surreal and mesmerising Latin American take on Lord of the Flies
Dir: Alejandro Landes. Cast: Sofia Buenaventura, Julianne Nicholson, Deiby Rueda, Julián Giraldo, Sneider Castro, Paul Cubides, Moises Arías, Karen Quintero, Wilson Salazar. Cert TBC, 104 mins
Well before the sight of a pig’s head on a stick being wielded by deranged child soldiers, the hallucinatory Colombian thriller Monos has summoned the unmistakable aura of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. We begin above the clouds, with Andean peaks dotting the distant horizon: a ragtag teenage cadet corps, half boys, half girls, have been blindfolded for training. They’re being shaped into an armed guerrilla squad.
Even by the remote standards of, say, French Legionnaire training, the craggy and alien environment here is pretty next-level. The children perform callisthenics, engage in ritualised capoeira fighting, and line up for inspection by a drill sergeant who otherwise leaves them strictly to their own devices – which is to say, encamped on this mystic mountaintop, with only a bemused dairy cow called Shakira to sustain them. They have a hostage in their charge, too – an American engineer they call “Doctora” (Julianne Nicholson), who has been abducted for reasons at which we can only guess.
Brazilian-born director Alejandro Landes withholds the political context, or even basic story information, that a more conventional picture would provide. None of these children are given a background, and there’s no discussion of whatever ideology is driving the militia to which they belong. The drill sergeant, known only as The Messenger, is played by a remarkable actor called Wilson Salazar, a diminutive guy with a bodybuilder’s aggressive physique, like a combination of R Lee Ermey, Hervé Villechaize and Popeye.
He addresses the eight-strong unit with a set of nicknames – Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Wolf (Julián Giraldo), Dog (Paul Cubides) – and two of them seek permission to form a couple. Mostly, though, they go wild in his absence – whooping, rough-housing, shooting stray rounds into the sky at dusk. Sparks float up from a campfire as the extraordinary score by Mica Levi (Under the Skin; Jackie) insinuates itself into the mix: sometimes you’re not sure if you’re listening to the kids whistling to each other, or one of her stealthy flute cues.
The livid, sometimes trippy photography, which pulls off some brilliantly dynamic underwater sequences, is just as remarkable. The film descends into a rainforest unannounced, and Brownian motion takes hold, with the members of this fast-disintegrating outfit wandering off high on mushrooms, sexually experimenting every which way, and rarely sticking to any given brief. These are children, play-acting at war – but with the dangerous combination of hormones and actual weapons.
No wonder Nicholson’s character, increasingly terrified, makes a bid to escape them, strapping water bottles to her waist as flotation aids and skulking into a fast-flowing river. She isn’t the film’s protagonist, except for one reel midway when she seizes its skittish attention, a harried survivor set upon at night by the worst mosquito attack in filmic memory, as the children mobilise to get her back.
For some, the zonked, abstract gambits of the editing may dampen the dramatic charge here and there. But it’s visceral and disquieting all the way through, dropping us into a situation with no prescribed rules. We’re like blindfolded trainees in our own right, forced to figure out how to sink or swim.
The extremity of the landscape and the increasingly feral group dynamics recall such art-house marvels as Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Beau Travail, but without obviously genuflecting to any one source of inspiration (except, perhaps, Golding). There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.
MONOS is in UK cinemas across UK & Ireland now
