Alejandro Landes’ Monos has the plot of 2010s YA drama but with the feel of 1970s Werner Herzog. The title means ‘monkeys’ in Spanish and refers to a bunch of feral kids playing at soldiers, trying to keep their hostage and their hormones under control. Uniquely, Landes’ film is at once almost entirely plotless but also thrilling, mixing up breathless set-pieces with mesmerizing, textured filmmaking to create a nihilistic world where no rules apply and morality gets blurred in favour of simply staying alive.
From the get-go, Landes plunges into a hostile, almost sci-fi environment with no context as a crutch. We start in the misty mountain-tops of a never-named South American country with a group of kids playing football blindfolded, a bell ringing signifying a goal. Put through their paces by their diminutive drill sergeant, the group — with pugnacious code names like Bigfoot (Moises Arias), Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Wolf (Julián Giraldo) and Boom Boom (Sneider Castro) — fight boredom (they tie glowsticks to the resident cow, have an obligatory dance around a bonfire) and each other as they wait for their orders from a mysterious outfit known as The Organisation. They torment their captive (a buttoned-down, jittery Nicholson), known only as ‘Doctora’, but, despite living in an adult world, never fully escape their adolescent impulses.
A singular, original work of heavy atmosphere, memorable images, exciting action and dream-like logic.
The first half is built around an axis of anarchy and tension which amps up into full-blown survival mode in the second half, as the kids and Doctora are thrown in the jungle to fend for themselves. Mudslides, escape attempts, mosquitos and a wild trip on mushrooms send the film into different zones of madness which build to a last third of inevitable violence. As the film goes on the Western world slowly creeps in — bizarrely a TV displays documentaries about gummy bears and Beethoven — but Monos operates in its own milieu. If initially it is difficult to discern the different personalities of the soldiers, Landes and writer Alexis Dos Santos compound confusion further by constantly shifting focus between characters, killing off protagonists, bringing seemingly minor characters to the fore. It’s an unsettling approach that keeps you constantly off guard.
The touchstones are numerous — Lord Of The Flies, Apocalypse Now, Intacto, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God; there is even something of the immediate intimacy of Larry Clark’s Kids in the teen-make out scenes — but Landes wears his referencing lightly on his sleeve. Instead, this is a singular, original work of heavy atmosphere, memorable images (from sweeping jungle vistas to huge close-ups of mud-covered faces), exciting action and dream-like logic, all propelled by Mica Levi’s brutal percussive score, one of the best of 2019. Immersive is an overused word, but Monos feels more experiential and tactile than any 3D glasses or 4DX could muster. It’s never an easy watch, but one well worth venturing into.
