Monstrous review: Christina Ricci anchors a Twilight Zone-style horror film

Christina Ricci is an actor who was blessed with both luck and failure to get a stage role that would be recognizable at a young age. As a preteen in the early ’90s, she played Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family Its sequel and how it haunts her. She will forever be remembered as a spooky, sinister, and charming child. It doesn’t help that she’s retained a girlishness into her 40s, with a tiny, birdlike frame; enormous, wide-set eyes; and the precise, buttoned-down manner of someone who had to grow old before her time.

Kirsten Dunst, her contemporary, feigned her transcendent performance in Interview with the VampireRicci was a blockbuster star and received arthouse praise. However, Ricci became typecast and disappeared from public view just like Winona Ryder 10 years earlier. It turns out the solution wasn’t fighting the typecasting, but leaning into it. With her spectacular turn as the sociopathically cheerful loner Misty in 2021’s breakout series YellowjacketsRicci exorcised Wednesday Addams and summoned another demon child. Misty trades off Ricci’s image but is fully under her control, and she’s layered with unexpected comedy, pathos, and malice. It’s enough to finally shift how people think of Ricci and her career.

This makes it a great time for Ricci, to assume a lead role. Ricci owns every second of this small creature feature. MonstersThe 1950s-set chiller with an espionage secret is portrayed by. Her role is that of Laura, the bright but brittle mother to Cody, 7 years old (Santino Barnard). They are moving into their new lives in 1955 in California, where they rent a house. Cody is calm but not depressed, and Laura is wildly optimistic. It soon becomes clear that they’ve fled a terrible situation. Cody longs to be home. Laura, however, rules that out. Cody says he forgives his father for whatever horror he’s committed, but Laura can’t.

Laura insists on building their small-town paradise. Cody is enrolled in school, and Laura finds a job as an typist. Cody finds himself being watched over by something horrible that pulls out from the lake next to the house. The monster’s appearance changes from one to the next: liquid and oily, skeletal, billowing, or something like a mass pondweed. It’s spooky stuff. Cody finds himself drawn to the lake after one terrifying encounter. He says “the pretty lady” wants him to join her there. That’s when Laura’s world starts falling apart.

The superb UFO film 2020 The Vast of Night, MonstersThis is an homage to 1950s pulp fiction. Twilight Zone The combination of fear, desire, and terror that is inspired by something unknown and foreign can send chills through the society. The film was a straightforward tale told in a rich, live-in style on widescreen. MonstersCarol Chrest and Chris Sivertson direct.

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You might find it. You can also straightforward. There’s something rote and inert about the world the film builds: the gleaming chrome of Laura’s turquoise station wagon, the crisp outline of her A-line skirts, the needle-drop of The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman.” There isn’t a note out of place in a tune we’ve heard a thousand times before. Ricci struggles initially against the dialogue, making her performance seem uncomfortably rigid and lackluster. The film only comes to life in a few fleeting moments: in Laura’s strangely testy encounters with the landlord and his suspicious wife (Don Baldaramos and Colleen Camp); in a silent, unexplained long shot of another boy running away from Cody in the playground; and in the appearances of the monster, a multifaceted creation that’s all the more unsettling for being so difficult to pin down in the mind’s eye.

It turns out that some of these selections may not have been accidental. Monsters is upended at a point in the story that wouldn’t work nearly so well if everything that preceded it wasn’t so deliberate and plainspoken. Although the film’s final choices work well, they may not be enough to bring about the desired effect. You can also late to redeem what’s come before. If Chrest and Sivertson had invested less in planning for this twist and more in fleshing out the world and characters that build up to it — or, for that matter, in dealing sensitively and persuasively with the implications of its closing stretch — MonstersIt would make a better film.

What MonstersHowever, what it does offer is the chance to see Christina Ricci let go of all of her elaborate artifices and fierce control over so many performances. Instead, we get something real and raw. It’s Wednesday again, Misty, even Laura. MonstersThe audience follows along and is able to see the vulnerability underneath the surface. It’s a moment of truth from an actor who’s usually asked to play to our preconceptions about her, and it’s a welcome jolt of reality in an otherwise strangely detached little movie.

MonstersIt is Limited theatrical releaseIt is also available to rent out or buy. Amazon, VuduOther digital platforms.