From its opening shot — a woman with a slit throat trying to secure her head to her neck while surrounded by sheep — to its final image — a creature lumbering around a field —Murder Me, Monster is a police procedural-monster-movie mash-up that is both surreal and intense. Yet for all its dark delights, writer-director Alejandro Fadel’s MO is to be as abstruse and obtuse as possible, meaning that while it’s a film that stays with you, getting to the end is a borderline test of endurance.
It’s a potentially fun premise yet Fadel drains it of any drama by spinning the story via elliptical plotting and a funereal pace.
Investigating the murder of the decapitated woman in the Andes mountain region is Cruz (Victor Lopez, great face), a taciturn cop who in his private moments with married lover Francisca (Tania Casciani) can’t help but do a silly dance. The prime suspect in Cruz’s detective work is David (Esteban Bigliardi), who just happens to be Francisca’s husband, and is beset by hallucinations, labouring under the delusion that he is being telepathically controlled by a killer monster. It’s a potentially fun premise yet Fadel drains it of any drama by spinning the story via elliptical plotting and a funereal pace. As Cruz’s investigations take in jotting down weird symbols in a notebook, Fadel also layers in Peter Greenaway-style games based around 3 Ms — three mountains, Murder Me, Monster — that further dilute any urgency in the storytelling.
Yet within the maddening malaise, Murder Me, Monster does score some points. Jorge Prado registers as Cruz’s police chief, adding zero-degree humour by shouting “FORENSICS!” at every crime scene. It’s also a film that drips with a heavy atmosphere, mining mood from darkness in wide-open rural spaces and tiny details like a strange oversized tooth and oozy yellow gunk. The monster, when it arrives, is also a fantastic creation, clearly a man in a suit but concocted with a Guillermo del Toro-like imagination, wielding a face like a vagina dentata and a penis as a tail. It’s just a shame that the critter didn’t get a more dynamic starring vehicle.