Monstrous

Monstrous offers a strong premise and some fresh twists, particularly in a genre where gimmicky filmmaking has prevailed.

Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama Monstrous, a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house.

Ricci’s assured and robust lead performance helps build upon some exciting ideas in the script and is ultimately the reason to watch. She is thoroughly captivating and, while the film never reaches her level of excellence, it is still a relatively fun, wonky ride.

An uneven but likable horror film with one of the better plot twists in recent memory.

There's a difference between intentionally misleading the audience and cleverly setting up, then subverting, expectations. Ultimately, "Monstrous" does the former, leaning far too heavily on expository dialogue that fundamentally contradicts everything the audience is seeing.

What really drags it down is the wafer-thin script by Carol Chrest, which neither Sivertson nor a determined if sometimes overblown Ricci can pull past its messy metaphor and undeserved twists.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a more stillborn finished product, an exercise in tedium which checks the barest boxes of “completed movie” and possibly delivers unknown benefits for some of those executive producers, but otherwise offers nothing that might engage an audience.

Monstrous is one of the scars of the blood-weeping horror cinema. While its dramatic narrative is acceptable but the horror part is pretty bad. As I have said many times in my reviews, horror cinema needs to be renewed.

I appreciated the mood and feel of its beginning, in which it feels like you're trapped in an period of time, but that's basically the extent of its merits. The rest doesn't work. It works neither as the drama about grief it addresses, nor as the horror film it tries to be at times when it never really takes off. Christina Ricci has gone too many years without a good role. Better see her in Yellowjackets.