Starring Lily Sullivan, Ling Cooper Tang, Ansuya Nathan, Eric Thomson, Matt Crook, Terence Crawford, Kate Box, Rashidi Edward, Brigid Zengeni, Belle Kalendra-Harding, Chase Coleman, Damon Herriman, Rebecca Summerton and Janet Tan

Directed by Matt Vesely

Bonsai Films, available digitally now

A disgraced journalist (Lily Sullivan) hides out at her parents’ house while they’re away. She takes a job working for a paranormal podcast and discovers a story. Floramae (Ling Cooper Tang and Janet Tan) contact her about a mysterious brick. The story opens up, the interviewer dives in and the truth, or something like it, is revealed.

Matt Vesely’s micro-budget filmmaking creates unease from the most carefully mundane things. There’s a repeated tracking down corridors whose payoff is a 1-2 punch of abject terror and a beautiful moment of metaphorical surrealism as a colossal alien (?) brick appears unseen over the Interviewer’s house. The wide open, serene spaces are slowly filled by the Interviewer’s obsessive detritus and the space degrades even as she become a focused arrow, fired straight at what she thinks is the truth. Most of the cast are voice only, the other end of phone calls that drag the Interviewer further in even as she realizes she should turn back. The escalation in Lucy Campbell’s script is beautifully executed, unfolding like a true crime podcast as the Interviewer finds out more, has more questions and slowly realizes her journey is not the shape, or to the destination, she thought. This is a puzzle box movie and it’s one that really does assemble itself at the end. In fact, that assembly is both the core of the story and the core of the terror. The implications here are brave enough to be vast and clever enough to give you everything you need, even if the odds are that another viewer will draw a different, just as valid, conclusion as you.

Sullivan is on screen for almost the entire runtime and she’s superb. Anyone impressed with her turn in Evil Dead Rise will see the same commitment here but in an entirely different way. The Interviewer is broken a dozen different ways and all too aware of all of them. Sullivan shows us every flaw and better still shows us the Interviewer seeing them too. There’s a moment where she changes the context of an interview response which is one of the biggest scares in the movie because Sullivan shows us everything. She knows it’s wrong. She knows it has consequences. She does it anyway.

Monolith, despite its tiny scope, is a story about complexity. Nothing is quite what it seems, no one is telling the whole truth and the person we trust to assemble the story is cutting it into the shape she needs it to be not the one it should be. All that leads to a delightful closing moment which can be read several different ways and a deeply rewarding, and disturbing, experience.

Verdict: Small in scope, massive in implication. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart