Monday, October 17, 2022

October Horror Challenge 2022 #69: "Monstrous"

I haven't seen Christina Ricci in anything in awhile. I think the last thing I saw her in was a Lizzie Borden movie, and she did a great job in that, but the nature of the role has her playing a villain, or at least an ambiguous character who COULD BE the bad guy, so it's nice to see her playing the good guy again in this movie. it's nice to root for her again. She plays a mother in this movie trying to start over in life after leaving an abusive relationship, so things in her life are already scary enough even before anything supernatural happens.

In this movie, a mother named Laura and her seven year old son Cody are leaving an abusive relationship and trying to start over in a huge farmhouse in California with a mysterious pond on the property that Cody insists has a monster in it. In fact both Cody and his mom are suffering from nightmares, and Laura is trying to convince Cody that there's nothing to be afraid of, but it soon becomes clear that there is something evil in the house, something that's after Laura and Cody, trying to threaten their fragile existence. Will they be able to defeat the monster before it's too late?

This is one of those mind-bendy movies that isn't totally rooted in reality, and as the movie goes on it gets harder to tell what's really happening and what's a delusion. Laura is insistent that nothing's wrong and that everything is fine even when her world is obviously crumbling around her and it's hard to follow what's going on in the movie when suddenly a huge twist comes out of nowhere and wallops you in the face. I'm not sure how I feel about the movie after the twist happens, because like with every unreliable narrator movie you never really know for sure what's really going on in any given moment, but I guess this movie is a decent way to kill an hour and a half. I've seen better, but I've definitely seen worse too.

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