anne hathaway

FYC 2023: Primo Trash

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There are a few tried & true Awards Bait subgenres that always get released in bulk this time of year, in hopes of dredging up some much-coveted Oscar Buzz: the miserabilist drama in which glamorous movie stars bravely ugly themselves up to look like downtrodden commonfolk, the Wikipedia-summary biopic in which movie stars cosplay as recognizable historical figures through prosthetic “transformations”, the buttoned-up period piece that scoops up a couple easy Best Costume Design statues while no one is looking, etc.  As much as The Academy has strived to change public perception of what qualifies as “An Oscars Movie” by diversifying its voting membership in recent years, we all still recognize Awards Bait when we see it.  That’s what makes it so fun to spot the interlopers among traditional late-in-the-year releases – the trashy genre pictures that somehow get mismarketed as Serious Dramas for Adults to help fill out studios’ FYC publicity campaigns.  Every now and then a sickly, grotesque psychological thriller like Joker will win a couple Oscars because it happens to star Joaquin Phoenix, who was grandfathered in as an Awards Contender from past, prestigious work.  The Shape of Water, The Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Traffic, Training Day, Suicide Squad, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . . . There’s room for one or two trashy genre pictures to sneak into every Awards Season conversation, often resulting in the Oscars’ most controversial Major Category wins.  Personally, I always find the chaotic discourse sparked by those lowly genre outliers amusing this time of year, since everything else about the Awards Season ritual feels so predictably repetitive & set in stone.

Since the hyperbolic decrying of Joker as “dangerous” and (more credibly) creatively bankrupt in 2019, I’m not sure there’s been a more divisive genre winner than Emerald Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar the very next year (among five nominations, including Best Picture).  A bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic, Promising Young Woman was mostly treated as a Serious Film worthy of awards consideration because of its relevance to #MeToo era feminism.  If released in any other context than the Awards Season window the year Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison, it likely would have been ignored by the Awards Industry establishment, as most high-style, low-logic thrillers are.  Instead, it became a hotly debated item of great political importance that year, picked apart for months by critics and the general commentariat for the ways its feminist talking points fall apart under politically informed scrutiny (especially as it resolves in last-minute copaganda).  Just a couple years later, Fennell’s follow-up, Saltburn, is repeating the same pattern.  An airport paperback mockbuster version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn is trashy, catty pulp that has the misfortune of being marketed & evaluated as Serious Art.  It’s another deliciously styled, politically vapid thriller from Fennell, who still has yet to learn how to land a dismount in the last few pages of her screenplays but fills those pages with plenty eye candy to keep you smiling on the journey to that letdown.  If released in the summer under any other director’s name, it would likely get by okay as Skinsploitation schlock, but the film festival & FYC awards screener ritual is unkind to that kind of beach-read indulgence – whether or not it eventually wins her a second Oscar. 

I don’t think all of this instant, widespread scrutiny is healthy for Emerald Fennell’s art or career.  Saltburn is an improvement over Promising Young Woman in most formalist contexts, but her loopy screenwriting impulses & confused politics persist here in a way that’s going to make her a repeat target for vitriolic discourse if she doesn’t start cutting her teeth on quieter projects.  Here, she makes a grand political statement on the issue of Class instead of the issue of Misogyny, tracking the sinister social ladder maneuvers of a cash-strapped Barry Keoghan among the friends, family, and portraits of “dead rellies” on Jacob Elordi’s grand, titular estate.  Anyone who’s ever seen a class-interloper thriller before knows exactly where Saltburn is going about halfway into the first act, so it’s unclear how shocking the details of Keoghan’s violent climb up the University of Oxford social ladder are supposed to be as they’re gradually doled out as gotcha reveals.  The details of his obsessive, covetous attraction to Elordi’s dirtbag rich boy hunk are a fun diversion from the FYC season’s traditionally stuffy, buttoned up fare, though, especially by the time Keoghan is slurping up Elordi’s bathwater after a vigorous jerk off session.  There’s a lot to be annoyed about in Saltburn if you’re looking for critical ammunition: the impatient trailer & recap montages that bookend the story, the choice to frame the grand opulence of its vast exteriors in Academy Ratio, the anachronistic needle drops that fall outside its 2006 setting, etc.  I guess I just didn’t take it seriously enough to be enraged by it, the way much more serious critics are.  To me, it falls more in the trashy, disposable lineage of a Gossip Girl, Cruel Intentions, Fierce People, or Do Revenge than in the lineage of great works like Mr. Ripley or Kind Hearts & Coronets.  It’s dumb, harmless fun.

I at least understand how Fennell’s precedence as a promising Oscar Winner earns Saltburn an automatic slot in the Awards Season conversation.  The Thomasin McKenzie vehicle Eileen is more of an enigma in that context, even though it’s the better film.  Is it McKenzie’s association with recent (and likewise divisive) Oscar-winner Jojo Rabbit?  Is it the venerated movie star glamour of co-star Anne Hathaway?  Hard to say.  The marketing for Eileen seems to be leaning on its Christmastime setting and its themes of lesbian obsession to position it as an indulgence in Carol cosplay.  Calling it “Carol for perverts” might be bordering on redundancy, so maybe let’s settle for “Carol as dime store paperback noir.”  It’s as if a Patricia Highsmith obsessive found Todd Haynes’s adaptation of The Price of Salt a little too classy to properly represent her work, so it was time to dirty up her reputation again.  As soon as its title card materializes in throwback 40s noir font, it’s clear that the movie is having fun with familiar genre tropes, resurrecting an outdated mode of crime thriller screenwriting in seedy homage.  What follows is a fun, loopy, perversely detailed daydream that doesn’t make much sense in the context of real-world logic, but follows the sweaty, impulsive logic of noir-era crime novels.  It’s a story told through intrusive thoughts, illustrating the violent & sexual fantasies of McKenzie’s character as she imagines fucking or killing everyone within arm’s reach – depending on whichever desire applies.  It takes a while for her to lose the distinction between imagined behavior vs. real-world action, saving the movie’s physically violent turn for third-act catharsis, but there’s plenty trashy, sordid imagery to string the audience along to that shocker conclusion.

Like Saltburn, Eileen is less commendable for the events of its plot than it is for the tensions between its two main characters.  McKenzie’s protagonist is just as much of a violent little outsider weirdo as Keoghan’s; she just does as a better job of managing her violent impulses . . . for a while.  She stars as a lonely small-town prison employee with no regular social interaction outside the verbal abuses of her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), who describes her as a non-person, the 1960s equivalent of an NPC.  Filling her days with chronic masturbation and daydreams of bloodshed, she’s shaken out of her routine by the hiring of a new prison psychologist: a chain-smoking Hitchcock blonde played by an unusually devious Hathaway.  The film’s visual echoes of Carol set up an expectation that Hathaway will be more involved in the central drama than she really is; she’s really just there to accelerate the obsessive, intrusive impulses of McKenzie’s imagination until tragedy inevitably strikes.  Like in Saltburn, the lurid promise of their same-sex attraction is never physically consummated between bedsheets, but instead pays off in murder.  Neither work could be credibly accused of “queerbaiting”, though, since their main characters’ sexual desires are explicitly detailed to the point of obsessive kink.  It’s just that they’re both more psychological thrillers about intensely strange social outsiders than they are proper erotic thrillers about genuine, dangerous relationships.  Most of the sordid action takes place in the characters’ warped imaginations.  In that context, Eileen is the more satisfying movie of the pair, since it’s more of a thorough character study of a single person’s psyche than it is diagnostic of a larger, metaphorical social issue.

I don’t mean for this pairing to be predictive of either film’s Awards Season chances.  I have no idea whether Saltburn or Eileen will make a dent on professional publications’ Best of the Year lists or stick around for the grueling gauntlet of Oscars Discourse.  I’m only responding to them in this context because they were screened for critics’ Awards Consideration in the final month of the year instead of being unceremoniously ignored the way most trashy, pulpy thrillers are for rest of the calendar.  The reasoning for that awards push is baffling to me in both cases, outside maybe the chance they give their actors to try out new, exotic accents onscreen (English & New English, respectively).  I welcome the kind of discoursive chaos genre films like this bring to the Awards Season ritual, though, no matter how little they belong in conversation or how annoying that conversation gets when they happen to break through & win something.

-Brandon Ledet

Locked Down (2021)

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Doug Liman’s COVID-themed, straight-to-HBO romcom Locked Down has seemingly hit a raw nerve for a lot of the pro critics who were assigned to cover it. What I found to be a low-key, innocuous charmer has been burdened with tons of handwringing about what Popular Art is allowed to be made & distributed during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The collective complaint appears to be that movies should transport their audience away from the time & place we occupy, not dwell in it; or at least that being stuck in our domestic spaces for the past year has emphasized a need for pop culture escapism. Locked Down‘s major faux pas against good taste is in its desire to be of-the-moment, compromising its value as fluff entertainment by reminding us just how miserable it is to be alive in our confined, isolated worlds right now. It has critics gritting their teeth in guarded anticipation of more COVID-themed pop media to come, especially since ongoing lockdown restrictions continue to limit what can be made & distributed in the year. I just personally fail to see how any of this is intrinsically bad.

A lot of my openness to COVID-themed pop media is an extension of my interest in, of all things, social media-themed horror films. I do love a gimmicky exploitation flick that fixates on the distinctly modern evils of momentary novelties like Skype calls (Unfriended), ride-share apps (Spree), Facebook timelines (Friend Request), Instagram clout (Ingrid Goes West), camgirl chatrooms (Cam), and so on. Not only are these technophobic thrillers entertaining for their traditional genre payoffs, but they’re also culturally valuable for daring to document the particular inanities of what our lives look & feel like online in a way that the more respectable corners of Mainstream Cinema wouldn’t dare. In a way, Locked Down (along with other COVID-era productions) is a natural evolution of that kind of strike-while-the-iron’s-hot exploitation filmmaking. It’s blatantly capitalizing on the idiosyncrasies of surviving the past year by using them to flavor an otherwise superficial, well-behaved genre film. The only difference is that it’s hanging those of-the-moment details off of genres people usually take more seriously than the technophobic horror: the break-up drama, the romcom, the heist film, etc. Whether or not that kind of cynical Life During COVID documentation violates a current cultural desire for Movie Magic escapism, it will only become more valuable the further we get away from this moment.

In fact, Locked Down is already a document of a bygone era. Its version of Life During COVID is more specific to the earliest lockdown orders of last March when the world at large finally started taking the virus seriously (i.e. when it nearly assassinated Tom Hanks). Anne Hathaway & Chiwetel Ejiofor star as a bitter Londoner couple who foolishly break up just when the stay-at-home orders hit the city, confining their romantic meltdown to a single (fabulously stylish) house they’re pressured not to leave. Their isolation from the outside world and increased “alone” time triggers an avalanche of neurotic second-guessings of their life philosophies & self-mythologies. They not only reassess their relationship, but also the overall trajectory of their life together, their individual professional careers, and the world at large. Meanwhile, early-pandemic observations about empty city streets, supermarket mask etiquette, at-home breadmaking, laggy Zoom calls (a convenient excuse for Celebrity Cameos), and the introduction of pajama bottoms to “office” wear anchor those alone-time reassessments to a very specific, instantly recognizable moment in recent history. All of this anti-romantic back & forth unfolds like a lightly bitter stage play (thanks mostly to the limited setting and the screenwriting contribution from Locke-director Steven Knight) until seemingly insignificant details accumulate to present an absurd opportunity to the struggling couple: they could easily pull off a minimal-effort diamond heist. Even just the suggestion of that risky transgression is enough to reignite their lost excitement for life & each other. The major conflict of the heist is not in its planning but in the decision of whether or not to go through with it at all.

In a word, Locked Down is cute. Like with the last time Anne Hathaway starred in a frothy heist comedy (Ocean’s 8), its only major sin is that it’s decent enough but Soderbergh could’ve done something phenomenal with the same cast & resources. Its major selling point—whether or not anyone knows it yet—is that it’ll be a great fluffy time capsule for people who were too snooty or squeamish to watch last year’s Host. The promotional materials for Locked Down have claimed that it’s “one of the first and most ambitious films to be conceived and shot during the pandemic”. I know that’s bullshit for two glaring reasons: 1. Critics who are professionally assigned to watch & review pop media are apparently already sick of grappling with COVID-era cinema, indicating that it’s far from a novelty at this point. 2. The found-footage Zoom meeting horror flick Host was conceived, shot, and released last summer, when many of Locked Down‘s more zeitgiesty observations would’ve still felt fresh. Host was also way more ambitious in its genre payoffs & budget-defying stunts, whereas Locked Down is mostly just handsome celebrities exchanging cutesy monologues in a few limited locales. Even its central diamond “heist” is mostly a series of conversations. The only difference is that Host (despite being the far superior work) happens to belong to a genre that most audiences don’t take seriously as Art, whereas Locked Down echoes more widely familiar moods & rhythms of Mainstream Filmmaking, which has largely been halted for the past 10 months. Despite the cries of its COVID-era commentary being Too Soon, Too Crass, or Too Much, I think there’s immense cultural value to pop media like this directly grappling with the real-world circumstances that are limiting its scope by effectively documenting them for cultural posterity. It’s time-capsule exploitation filmmaking at its sweetest & most harmless, so I’m a little baffled as to why it’s become such a critical scapegoat.

-Brandon Ledet

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

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Since the city’s stay-at-home orders took effect this March, I’ve watched no fewer than six (six!) fashion-related reality competition shows: Project Runway, Next in Fashion, Making the Cut, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Dragula, and Glow-Up. A major part of these shows’ appeal to me during the pandemic has simply been the pleasure of watching someone routinely complete an artistic project from start to end without taking a second’s pause. Meanwhile, I’ve been wasting a lot of the downtime I’d usually dedicate to writing & illustrating by staring slack-jawed at my phone, endlessly scrolling through the same three or four apps long after I’ve drained them of their entertainment or informational value. These runway competition shows would have eventually snuck into my media diet with or without a global pandemic, however, since fashion is an artform I’ve been trying to pay more attention to in general. It’s probably the most vital artistic medium I’ve overlooked & undervalued throughout my life – an oversight I’ve been actively striving to correct in recent years. After tiring out on podcasts & documentaries, fashion competition shows have been an excellent crash course in the terminology & history of fashion as artform, but they aren’t the only resource that have guided me through this personal journey in recent months; they had a little help from a mid-00s romcom.

The Devil Wears Prada is more overtly about the fashion industry as a business rather than fashion as artform. Based off the memoirs of a disgruntled former assistant to longtime Vogue editor & industry tastemaker Anna Wintour, the film is presented as a behind-the-scenes tell-all about how stressful & cruel the industry can be for unsuspecting artsy types who get sucked into its orbit. It’s hardly the tear-it-all-down exposé that dating competition shows like The Bachelor got in the similar tell-all series Unreal, however. Instead, its peek behind the Vogue Magazine curtain is utilized as a backdrop for some fairly straightforward romantic comedy storytelling, which both helps & hurts its value as fashion-world insight. To its detriment, The Devil Wears Prada suffers the classic romcom problem of cornering its lead (Anne Hathaway, playing a fashion-ignorant academic who improbably lands a job at the fictional Vogue surrogate Runway Magazine) into choosing between two dweebs who don’t deserve her (a snobby line-cook who believes fashion is for vapid rubes and a publishing industry bigshot who believes she’s outgrown her former social circle). However, since the film mostly focuses on her terrified admiration of her boss (Meryl Streep as the tyrannical Anna Wintour avatar), it more or less gets away with that cliché. This is mostly a story about a woman falling in & out of love with fashion itself; the men she dates along the way are just accessories.

Hathaway may be the least convincing dumpy-nerd-next-door casting since Sandra Bullock play a l33t hacker in The Net. She’s a perfectly cromulent choice for a romcom lead, though, especially as the fashion-ignorant academic turns up her nose at an entire artform for supposedly being beneath her intellectually. By contrast, Streep is without question perfectly cast as a tyrannical auteur who barely speaks above a whisper but still has an entire industry groveling at her stilettoed feet. There’s rarely a crack in her emotional armor that reveals any vulnerability or trace of humanity, but she’s consistently the film’s most useful keyhole into the power of fashion as an artform (in her confident editorial eye) and its destructive nature as an industry (in the fear-based environment she runs as an employer). Streep is fascinating to watch, so much so that you never question why her least fashion-aware employee would stick around for the daily abuse – even when her closest friends do. In the film’s best scene, Streep delivers a distinct, cutting monologue about the couture to ready-to-wear pipeline that influences Hathaway’s dumpy lead’s daily life while she naively believes fashion to be an inconsequential frivolity that does not affect her personally. It affects & influences us all, maybe more so than any other modern artform, and the journey Hathaway goes on here is mostly in learning how to accept that inescapable truth and use it to her full advantage.

There’s nothing especially novel about The Devil Wears Prada in terms of craft; it looks & acts like almost any post-80s studio romcom you can name (which is especially apparent in its refusal to challenge the fashion industry’s addiction to weight-shaming). Its earned foundational respect for fashion as an artform is what really saves it from falling into total tedium, an accomplishment it could not manage without Streep’s steely presence as an industry figurehead. Hathaway holds her own as an audience surrogate despite her naturally glamorous beauty (in a role that makes her image-subverting turn in Ocean’s 8 even funnier in retrospect), as does Stanley Tucci as the fashion insider who teaches her that clothes equal confidence (a role that feels like the birthplace of Modern Tucci). This is somehow still Streep’s movie, though, even if she barely ever lifts a finger or speaks above a whisper. I’m not well-versed enough in fashion industry lore to comment on whether she captured Wintour’s specific persona accurately, but she’s effortlessly electric throughout the picture the way all enigmatic auteurs are within their own artistic fiefdoms. If nothing else, that monologue about the ready-to-wear pipeline really is an all-timer, maybe the most succinctly insightful summation of fashion’s undetected importance I’ve come across so far in my scramble to play catch-up.

-Brandon Ledet

Ocean’s 8 (2018)

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Ocean’s 8 opens exactly like the Soderbergh version of Ocean’s 11 that preceded it, with Sandra Bullock in a parole hearing interview pretending to be reformed so she can be released and launch directly into her next grift. George Clooney sat in that same position back in 2001, which partly makes Ocean’s 8 feel just as much like Ghostbusters-style gender-flipped remake as it is a years-late sequel. Bullock is not a reincarnation of Danny Ocean, however, but rather his sister & criminal equal, Debbie Ocean. Likewise, the film does not follow the Soderbergh “original” or its Rat Pack source material’s plot about smooth criminals simultaneously robbing three Las Vegas casinos, but shifts its heist’s target to the much more femme setting of the annual Met Gala, one of high-fashion’s biggest events of the year. For better or for worse, it also shifts away from Soderbergh’s experimentations in overly slick, early 2000s thriller aesthetics to adopt a style more befitting of a 2010s mainstream comedy. As a result, both films are noticeably distinct from one another, but also notably cheesy and of their time in a way that pairs them as clear parallels (even though, once gain, this is a sequel and not a remake).

Although it’s about a decade late to the table, it’s arguable that Ocean’s 11 needed this women-led sequel, as it’s a series that’s always struggled with doing right by its female characters. In Ocean’s 11, Julia Roberts mostly had the thankless role of reacting to male characters’ actions & muttering vague warnings under her breath. For Ocean’s 13, both she & Catherine Zeta-Jones refused to return to the series because they were told the script could not accommodate giving them substantial roles beyond a couple lines of dialogue, despite having room for over a dozen men. Ocean’s 12, by far the best in the series (even if you include the also-excellent Logan Lucky), was much more accommodating of both actors, particularly for the opportunity it gave Julia Roberts to poke fun at her own celebrity (the same role she fulfilled in Sodebergh’s Full Frontal). Anne Hathaway is afforded the same self-satire platform in Ocean’s 8, but this time she’s not surrounded by a sea of men in tailored suits. Ocean’s 8’s cast includes Bullock, Hathaway, Rihanna, Awkwafina, Mindy Kaling, Helena Bonham Carter, Sarah Paulson, and Cate Blanchett as the titular eight. None of these already-established celebrities are playing against type, but rather lean into their public personae in an exaggerated way, like drag or pro wrestling characters. Hathaway clearly has the most fun with the space afforded her, but the important part is that this heist comedy playground was ever offered to this many talented women in the first place.

Immediately upon release from prison, Debbie Ocean launches into a few minor grifts that provide her temporary food & shelter. Once recharged, she begins recruiting the crew she needs to steal millions of $$$ in diamonds from the upcoming Met Gala, a much bigger heist than she’s ever attempted before. Cate Blanchett joins as a longtime bestie in full Atomic Blonde drag. Rihanna & Awkwafina are aggressively casual stoners gifted at street-level hacking & pickpocketing. Kaling is a jeweler, Bonham Carter a cash-strapped fashion designer, and so on. It’s Hathaway who steals the show as an image-obsessed, emotionally fragile actress whom the team plans to steal the diamonds off of, though. Public opinion of Hathaway has always been grotesquely judgmental about her supposedly outsized ego, so it’s wonderful to see her subvert that perception by turning it into a caricature. The heist itself, from the planning to the execution to the fallout with law enforcement, is all standard to the typical joys of the genre, except in an unusually haute setting drenched in fashion & wealth. The most distinctive factor at play is that the film is staged like a comedy more than a thriller, which suits the material well enough at least in the way it distinguishes it from Soderbergh’s previous trilogy (except maybe Ocean’s 13, its closest tonal parallel).

The cast is exceptional, the choice in setting inspired. The worst that could be said about Ocean’s 8 is that director Gary Ross burdens the film with all the visual style & generic pop music of an Alvin & the Chipmunks squeakquel. The flatness in its imagery & its dispiritingly indistinct pop music cues feel at home with the standard approach to the modern mainstream comedy, though, which is largely where the film lives & dies. Ocean’s 11 is often framed as being a stylish subversion of the heist picture formula, but its own hideous color saturation & music video experimentation also feels beholden to the worst aspects of its own era’s aesthetic, a post-Matrix techno thriller hangover that culminated in the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” PSA. Ocean’s 12, Logan Lucky, and now Ocean’s 8 all feel like improvements on that earlier picture in the way they work around its more glaring shortcomings, which is a kind of paradox in that they could not exist without it. Ocean’s 8 is, admittedly, the least impressive improvement of the three. It does the bare minimum of giving women something to do while still working within that film’s original framework, only shifting its genre context slightly closer to a standard comedy. It’s still funny & breezily charming within that modern mainstream comedy context, even while often slipping into pure unembarrassed cheese, which is the most Ocean’s 11 ever offered us in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

Colossal (2017)

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With his intricately-constructed time travel thriller Timecrimes, director Nacho Vigalondo found dark humor in the depths of selfishness in human self-preservation, exposing the ugliness of humanity as a species through the mechanism of a sci-fi fantasy plot. His American language debut, the kaiju-themed black comedy Colossal, shifts its genre & intended targets just slightly, but mostly repeats the trick. Through an outlandish genre film scenario, Colossal gradually strips away the veneer of polite smiles & social niceties that makes human beings appear to be kind, empathetic creatures to reveal the giant monsters lurking underneath. The destructive behavior of alcoholism & pretty selfishness in particular is giving a measurable, kaiju-scale impact of real-world damage. Much like in Timecrimes, the inner lives of Vigalondo’s characters aren’t given nearly as much attention as the implications of their actions within the larger, metaphor-heavy sci-fi plot, but the mystery of how that premise works & what it implies about the ugliness of humanity is enough to leave a lasting emotional bruise on the audience.

Anne Hathaway stars as a New York City socialite whose alcoholism finally crosses the threshold from “fun drunk” to full-on dysfunction, a conscious departure from the A-type personas she’s been saddled with since The Princess Diaries. Kicked out of the apartment she shares with an uptight boyfriend (Dan Stevens in full Matthew Crowley mode), she finds herself with few options but to move back to her small-town childhood home. She’s employed as a barkeep by an egotistically sensitive childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), which affords her way easier access to a steady stream of working-class staples Jack Daniels & PBR than is likely healthy for her. The nightly blackouts that her addiction downturn sparks start to branch out from pure self-destruction to negatively affecting millions of people: namely, the city of Seoul, South Korea. Whenever our drunken anti-hero finds herself wasted in the playground near her childhood home at the crack of dawn, a corresponding kaiju appears in Seoul and mimics her exact, stumbling movements, blindly killing anyone in its path. Once these repeating scenarios become undeniably linked, she must face hungover epiphanies like, “I killed a shitload of people because I was acting like a drunk idiot again.” Getting sober & improving herself isn’t enough to solve the problem entirely, though. As soon as she starts to get her life back together, a second monster appears in Seoul, challenging her sense of control in an increasingly ugly situation.

What’s most fun about the metaphorical sci-fi plots of Vigalondo’s work is that they continue to develop & complicate after their initial reveal. It’s not enough that the connection between the protagonist’s alcoholism and the giant monster terrorizing Seoul is made explicit. The film also pushes through to explore why the playground location & time of day correspond with its appearance, why Seoul in particular is connected to her in the first place, and what is implied by the appearance of the kaiju’s robot challenger. The answers to this mystery are lazily revealed through the device of a decreasingly cloudy repressed memory, but are satisfying enough in their impact to justify the transgression. Complicating the kaiju metaphor detracts tremendously from the energy spent on potential inner conflict & emotional depth, but also expands the film’s themes beyond the selfish destruction of addiction to include crippling jealousy, the cycles of physical abuse, and a myriad of other forms of destructive behavior. By the end of Colossal you have to ask if the bigger monster is the protagonist’s addiction or the poisonous group of self-serving men that populate her life. It’s a testament to how strong the mystery & provoked themes of the central metaphor are that it doesn’t at all matter that the characters remain surface level deep. Vigalondo’s ideas are intricate, plentiful, and mercilessly cruel to the virtues of humanity enough to carry this small-scale kaiju narrative on their own.

-Brandon Ledet