By Robert Scucci
| Published
Most movies involving a single on-screen character who never leaves their house often wear out their welcome within the first 30 minutes, but 2022’s Monolith is not one of them. Successful in generating tension with its limited casting and setting, Monolith tells a story of paranoia rooted in the paranormal without ever fully revealing its source of tension, leaving its disturbing ending open to interpretation.
While I have my own theories about the mystery leading up to the third act reveal in this claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, its destination isn’t nearly as important as its buildup, which finds its protagonist attempting to lay out a grand conspiracy brick by brick (literally) that she may very well unwittingly be a part of.
Everybody’s Podcasting Nowadays
Lily Sullivan portrays an isolated woman known only as The Interviewer in Monolith, and at first her story isn’t very unique. A disgraced journalist who tarnished her own reputation by getting caught lying about one of her investigations and experiencing the kind of career fallout you’d expect, The Interviewer is looking for her next big story that will help her reclaim her status as a reliable source in her field.
Resolving to start a podcast centered on the supernatural and other unexplainable occurrences, The Interviewer receives a call about a mysterious black brick that causes her to obsessively spiral as she hears a multitude of similar stories involving their sudden appearance, and their ability to make their subjects experience vivid, life-altering hallucinations, after broadcasting her first episode.
As the interview digs deeper and deeper in Monolith, she comes into contact with a German art collector named Klaus Lang (Terence Crawford), who has collected dozens, if not hundreds, of these black bricks, and who urges her to exercise caution in uncovering their origin.
Like most sci-fi thriller films that center on a somewhat unreliable protagonist, The Interviewer’s odyssey in Monolith becomes increasingly muddled, but not in ways that make you think “I’ve seen this before” because outside forces are obviously at play despite her slowly unraveling psychological state.
Don’t Mind The Tropes, They Actually Pay Off
Caught between a black brick and a hard place, The Interviewer embodies every single psychological thriller trope found in Monolith, but in ways that don’t take you out of the film. Sure, there are sequences that imply how The Interviewer is losing track of days while taping her findings to the windows and walls of her parent’s massive house in the remote wilderness, and phone calls from concerned friends and colleagues telling her that she’s gone too far down the bizarre rabbit hole she finds herself digging into, but there’s a validity to her paranoia because other people are experiencing similar phenomena.
While it’s easy to assume that The Interview is bending the truth in Monolith – which she does at times in the form of cleverly editing some of her phone calls – because her podcast quickly becomes a hit and she’s excited about this newfound feeling of validation that she so desperately craves, she still maintains a baseline level of journalistic integrity once she finds herself drowning in a deluge of copycat stories that she sincerely wants to verify before publishing her findings.
As she digs deeper into the mystery, matters only get more confusing when a brick arrives at her house, causing her to have visions similar to the ones reported to her.
Streaming Monolith On Tubi
Is The Interviewer having these visions because she’s heard so much about them and wants to experience them first-hand? Or is something more sinister at play that simply cannot be explained in rational terms? Concluding with an ending that’s wide open for interpretation, Monolith will leave you scratching your head and visiting message boards to unpack its many twists and turns.
Monolith starts out like your typical generic sci-fi thriller, and in many ways it is. But don’t let its narrative framework fool you because it subverts every expectation along the way, proving that the genre conventions you’re all too familiar with can still yield interesting results.
As of this writing, you can stream Monolith for free on Tubi.
