Monolith

The
Brick
Inside

Monolith
Directed by Matt Vesely
Australia 2022
Black Cat White Rabbit Productions
Screened 26 August 2023 at FrightFest, London

Wow. Okay... I think I’ve now seen what will easily, by a long chalk, be my favourite film of this year’s FrightFest. Monolith has a few actors in it but, it’s essentially a one hander. Which seems a contradiction but, to explain, it stars Lily Sullivan who gets an on screen character name billing of ‘The Interviewer’. She is the only actor in this movie who you will properly see... and the whole film deals with her and is shot at one location only (her parents beautiful house, while they are on vacation). All the other characters in the film are portrayed either by the sound of their voices only (the majority of them and sometimes coupled with a photo reference of them) or, in one instance, a ‘home video’ of a person’s birthday party. And that’s it.

So Lily Sullivan has to do all the heavy lifting but, hey, she does it easily and she’s helped out by some great direction and editing, a superb script (by Lucy Campbell) and one of those intriguing concepts, the exploration of which just gets more gripping as the movie goes on.

Sullivan plays a disgraced journalist who didn’t procure the necessary evidence before making claims about a villain... and has been discredited, even though the person she was talking about was obviously guilty of all her accusations. So, she lands a new job doing a podcast for a place in the vein of all those uncanny and supernatural shows which deal with ghosts, UFOs and various other unexplained phenomena. She has all of her podcasting equipment set up at her parents’ temporarily vacated house but... she just can’t get a good angle for a story and her new editor is screaming for her to hit her first deadline.

Then she gets an anonymous tip to call someone and stumbles on a story which she podcasts about as she goes, episode by episode, capturing the imagination of the listening public and doing huge numbers as she continues her investigation. An investigation of strange black bricks which suddenly turn up in peoples homes (how remains a mystery until much later on because, none of the hordes of listeners who call in want to reveal how they got their black brick). The bricks are causing visions and unusual sensations and also might be a similar phenomenon to something which the UK government were looking into at some point as a possible sound or verbally transmitted infectious disease. And things, as you would expect, start to land closer to home as she continues her investigation.

Okay, so I don’t have anything bad to say about this movie, unusually. It’s near perfect. But there are some nice things I should highlight.

One is that the director, Matt Vesely, seems almost obsessed with verticals. One of the rooms the main character inhabits, the one you see the most of from different angles, has a backdrop of floor to ceiling windows split into about six vertical sections looking out at the surrounding land and, as you might expect, Vesely uses this to frame his lead actress within the space and compartmentalise her within the shots. It’s done really well.

Another thing he does is play around with sound a lot. Lily Sullivan’s character is a wizard with sound as she controls, edits and manipulates the voices of the people she interviews, so the audio design is giving a lot of attention here. Some of the shots like the long opening, are just black which slowly (very slowly) fades up slightly to reveal the focus of the shot... such as the texture of a microphone in the opening sequence. And the director employs this kind of tactic a few times as well as doing things like holding shots of the on screen representation of two voices, picking up the graphic of the sound waves as they are recorded... which is a nice touch.

Now, there are no real surprises if you think things out as you go. For a while you will find yourself looking at every part of the screen to figure out how the director will reveal the inevitable arrival of a brick into the central protagonist’s home environment. However, there are a lot of clues as to the nature of the brick and so, in some ways, you may see it coming well in advance. For example, if you listen carefully to the first interview subject which starts the film off and appears to be nothing to do with the subject ‘the interviewer’ will find herself researching (but you may be best served remembering it), then you’ll probably find yourself with a little clue about where the film is ultimately heading, by way of homaging a certain 1950s science fiction film which has been ‘officially’ remade at least three times (to my knowledge).

And you’ll probably figure out fairly early on from where the brick will arrive. You’ll figure out the delivery method (with more clues in the main character study) and will probably be wondering if it will be Route A... the more mainstream, cinematically acceptable safer route which would, in real life, be the most dangerous method of delivery for the character... or Route B which would be a little less watchable, perhaps but, a lot less dangerous for a character in a similar situation. And I won’t spoil it for you by giving any clues but, I reckon most people will be primed to know how the brick will be arriving into the main protagonist’s life.

But, unlike most films, the lack of surprise there is not a weakness. It’s absolutely perfect and in turn leads to a finale which is even more dramatic and gets to, admittedly, another cinematic cliché (fans of M. R. James or 1990s J-Horror will know what I’m talking about here) but it works really well and it’s a good ending.

And I’m not sure there’s much else I want to say about Monolith. It’s an absolute gem of a movie which keeps the level of intrigue building throughout and which has a great conclusion. I can’t wait for a Blu Ray release of this one so I can show my dad. A really wonderful piece of paranoiac, cinematic art and everyone associated with this one should be heartily congratulated. Catch this one as soon as you get an opportunity to, is my advice.