Rated: MA 15+
Directed by: Alejandro Landes
Written by: Alexis Dos Santos, Alejandro Landes
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Sofia Buenaventura, Julian Giraldo, Karen Quintero, Laura Castrillón, Deiby Rueda, Sneider Castro, Paul Cubides.
Monos has been hailed as Lord of the Flies meets Apocalypse Now and with so many obvious parallels I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be a film I had already seen.
As Monos opens, the camera swoops in on a remote outpost atop a mountain, where a band of war orphans shelter in an abandoned bunker. From a distance the terrain is visually arresting and close-up the environment alternates between a muddy and wind-whipped wasteland overhung by great, boiling clouds and a private Shangri-La for the group of underage guerrillas. That is, until the encroaching conflict pushes the squad and their hostage down into the cover of the jungle below.
While Apocalypse Now also tracks an expedition into the tangled depths of the jungle, the primordial setting a mirror to the battle-ravaged psyche of a U.S. colonel gone rogue, Alejandro Landes’s film goes even deeper, beneath the skin to where the blood fizzes and thrums. In the swarming wilderness, birdlike tongue clicks identify the group to itself and a lone giggle rises up into the indifferent skies. With the ever-present helicopter rotors pulsing overhead, echoing both Apocalypse Now and the strains of a thumping heart, Mica Levi’s music score builds into a vast and panoramic soundscape that is at the same time utterly intimate.
Landes’s camera, too, continues this dance between near and far. On one level, telling the story in the traditional way with characters and dialogue and, on another, the soaring camerawork abstracting the experience. Unlike the two earlier films, each viewed through the prism of a single character, Monos is seen through the eyes of its several victims. While this approach does invoke the visceral experience, it also opens up a psychological distance that may not be to everyone’s taste. At the same time, this cinematic distancing also tilts the focus of the film ever so slightly.
Where Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now tell intensely human stories that arise from the social and political context of their times, Monos more directly addresses the context. At the outset, these child soldiers playing blind man’s bluff, indulging in communal pashing sessions and so gleefully spraying the slopes around them with machine gun fire enjoy an almost unfettered degree of freedom, but underlying it all are the unspoken fears that come with the threat of adult punishments and all-to-real consequences.
It is a culture shaped by its paramilitary status, but it is also a society populated by those young enough not to have preconceived notions of what a society should be. While the stories told by the two earlier films have emerged from highly organised social structures that they implicitly critique, there is no sense here that these teenagers have ever known a safe haven beyond their earliest years.
As the war encircles them, their micro-society does not so much fall apart as an already harsh regime mutates, morphing into an entity where those that wield the power will do absolutely anything to preserve their fiefdom and those on the receiving end will, equally, risk everything to get out.
Monos is both lyrical and shocking, an experience felt at the level of tissue and bone, and a story playing out, somewhere. Now.