- UK release: December 2010
- Director: Gareth Edwards · Writer: Gareth Edwards
- Studio / distributor: Vertigo Films; Protagonist Pictures
- Genre: Science-fiction road movie / romantic drama · Runtime: 94 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Scoot McNairy as Andrew Kaulder; Whitney Able as Samantha Wynden
- IMDb: 6.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 73% critics / 53% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
Call a film Monsters, sell it on a poster of a wrecked aircraft and a warning sign, and you set an expectation that this is going to be ninety minutes of creatures stamping through cities. It is not, and the gap between the title and the film is the first clever thing about it. Gareth Edwards, directing his first feature, has made the rare creature picture that is more interested in the quiet after the attack than the attack itself, and he has done it for the price of a decent advertising campaign rather than a studio tentpole. The headline figure that follows the film around is the budget, reportedly somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands, and the headline achievement is that you would never guess it from the screen.
The setup
Six years ago a probe returned from a moon of Jupiter carrying alien samples, broke up over Central America, and seeded an Infected Zone along the border between Mexico and the United States. Inside that zone the lifeforms have grown, spread and become something the military fences off and bombs rather than understands. Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photojournalist chasing the lucrative misery shots the magazines want, is handed an unwelcome job by his employer: get the boss’s daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), out of Mexico and safely back across the border to America. A stolen passport and a missed ferry turn the simple route into the hard one, on foot and by boat straight through the quarantined territory. From there the film is a two-hander, a long walk through a beautiful and dangerous country, with the creatures mostly a rumour on the horizon.
The cast
With a cast of essentially two, the whole film leans on whether you want to spend a long journey in their company, and for the most part you do. McNairy plays Kaulder as a tired opportunist who is not as cynical as he would like to be, a man whose first instinct on seeing a body is to reach for his camera and whose second is to wish he had not. Able gives Samantha a wariness that slowly thaws, a woman travelling towards a marriage she does not sound especially keen on. The two were a couple off screen at the time, and the unforced ease between them does real work here; the romance never announces itself, it just accumulates over shared fear and dead time. Neither is asked to be a hero, which suits the film. They are tourists in a war they did not start.
The craft
This is where the debut earns its reputation. Edwards shot, directed and ran the visual effects himself, building the creatures and the wreckage on a home computer and dropping them into footage caught on the move in real locations. The result has a documentary texture that bigger productions spend fortunes failing to fake. Toppled tanks rust in the jungle, customs gates loom out of the heat haze, ruined towns wear the aliens like weather. Jon Hopkins supplies a low, electronic score that hums under the landscape and does as much for the mood as any visible monster. The restraint is deliberate and mostly pays off. Edwards keeps the creatures off screen for long stretches, trusting an overheard radio report or a wall of warning graffiti to carry the dread, and when he finally lets you see them in full they are strange and oddly graceful rather than the snarling beasts the marketing implies.
How it stacks up
The obvious neighbour is District 9, which a year earlier married handheld, low-budget science fiction to a pointed allegory about borders and who gets to cross them, and Monsters is plainly drawn from the same well, swapping Johannesburg for the militarised line of a continent. Cloverfield is the other reference the title invites and then refuses; where that film was all panic and shaky spectacle, this one is patient and almost mournful. The deeper ancestor is Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with its slow trek into a forbidden Zone where the real subject is the people doing the walking. Set it beside any of those and Monsters holds its corner, less polished than District 9 but more atmospheric foot for foot.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 73%, praising the mood, the resourcefulness and the refusal to deliver the expected monster mash. Audiences are cooler, closer to 53%, and the split is easy to read: a good number of viewers bought a ticket for the film on the poster and got a slow border romance instead. Both reactions are fair. If you came for set pieces you will spend a lot of the runtime waiting, and the central pair occasionally wander into dialogue that strains for meaning it has not quite earned. I land with the critics, because the things this film does well are the things I value most in science fiction: a world you believe in, a tone that lingers, and the confidence to leave the spectacle implied.
Verdict
Monsters is a calling card, and a remarkably assured one. It is not the creature feature it was sold as, and a stretch in the middle drifts where a sharper script would have pushed. But the world-building is exceptional for the money, the atmosphere stays with you, and the final stretch lands an image you will not shake off. I would happily watch it again for the mood alone, which from me counts for a lot. It marks Edwards as a director worth following, someone who understands that the most frightening monster is usually the one you cannot quite see. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: On limited release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow in the new year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the calling card worked exactly as a calling card should. On the strength of Monsters, Gareth Edwards was handed the keys to Godzilla (2014) and later Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), making him one of the decade’s clearest examples of a micro-budget debut turning into a blockbuster career. A standalone sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent (2014), arrived without Edwards and made little impression. The original has settled into its reputation as a landmark in low-budget science fiction and a key text in the do-it-yourself effects movement. It is now widely available on disc and streams across the usual digital rental platforms.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for infrequent strong language, moderate horror. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: Scenes of moderate horror occur when characters come under threat from alien life forms. The attacks contain limited sight of blood or injury detail, although there is brief sight of a mutilated body in the aftermath of an attack.
Language: There is infrequent use of strong language (‘f**k’), along with mild bad language such as ‘shit’.
Additional issues: There are infrequent mild sex references such as a man asking a woman if she wants to ‘make out’.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk). The later home-video release was classified 15; the cinema certificate was 12A.
