One-character thrillers are tough to pull off under the best of circumstances, but first-time feature director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell actually make Monolith feel less like a one-woman play and more like a thrilling cinematic experience than I was expecting. Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise) plays a journalist whose outlet is pressured into forcing her to apologize and correct a story that she believes is accurate, and then fires her for her troubles. She joins up with an investigative podcast network and begins hosting her own show in which she investigates mysteries and unexplained phenomena—at least that's the plan. She’s having trouble getting an idea for the first episode when she receives a strange email about a brick with an image of a woman who might have a story to tell.
What follows is a winding, bizarre trip down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about people across the planet who have received these strange black bricks (about the size of a gold brick, but lumpier, more organic) that not only cause them to have visions that are often difficult to distinguish from reality, but seem tailor-made to the people who receive them (although none of the people who the reporter contacts will say how exactly they received their bricks). Even discussing the bricks seems to lead those interviewed down a mental path toward confusion and paranoia. Some claim their visions are about people they have wronged coming back to visit them; others are simply taken over by guilt or neurosis. And while Sullivan is the only person we see on screen, she’s on the phone constantly with her parents and her subjects.
The podcast becomes an instant hit, leading to more people reaching out to her about their encounter with these bricks, and before long, she uncovers decades-old articles about when and where these bricks and their influence first kicked into the mainstream. Some claim relatives who owned these bricks lost their souls and became empty shells after having their brick too close for too long, and it becomes clear that it may be possible that the bricks’ influence may be contagious, spread by the unlikeliest of means. The success of her podcast, but more importantly the validation that her reporting skills are sharper than ever, leads our protagonist down a path that may blind her to the possibility that someone is messing with her, and when this is called to her attention, she’s enraged at the fact that she may get disgraced once again.
Monolith has a satisfying number of twists and turns that finally reveal why the journalist may have been given the chance to break this story, and that’s when certain facts snap into place for her and the audience. The film isn’t especially scary or tense, but it still mostly works as a tale of a woman desperately attempting to salvage what’s left of her career and being blinded by her own ambition. Sullivan absolutely slays in this role, and when all is said and done, we don’t know how far gone she is or what she’s become. The movie is a slight thriller, but combined with great acting and a fairly clever story, it works more often than it doesn’t.
The film is now playing in a limited theatrical run and is available On Demand.
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