Monolith (Vesely, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Horror and science fiction are often the lifeblood of independent filmmakers, a place to cut their teeth and make a mark on a budget that is manageable. The idea that restrictions like budget are the fuel for true creativity finds traction here – what clever devices can the filmmaker deploy to suggest rather than reveal entirely? Some of the most important works of horror in cinema history fit under this banner – Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2, Halloween, The Blair Witch Project. There’s something about the confluence of horror and shoestring, indie filmmaking that feels apt, a certain fringe sensibility that makes the audience feel like they’re in unpredictable hands. The homemade quality enhances the terror, makes it feel immediate, present. It’s a strange but undeniable alchemy – the bigger budget horrors so rarely hit in quite the same way. 

Throughout May, Rialto Channel will be screening independent modern horror every Friday night – the perfect time, I daresay – and there are some truly compelling titles on the roster. Convent horror Deliver Us, made in 2023, foregrounds the current religious horror boom symbolised by the financial success of Sydney Sweeney-starrer Immaculate and critical hit The First Omen, a strain of horror that critic Bilge Ebiri argues reflects the increasing challenges put upon women’s freedoms in the modern age. Also worth checking out is last year’s It Lives Inside, an intriguing if not entirely successful horror that features a young Indian-American woman in the lead role – a lamentable rarity – and is notable for some wonderfully gnarly creature design in its final third. Then there’s Monolith, a bold and frequently unsettling Australian debut from Matt Vesely that offers yet another win for that country’s horror output, after the success of last year’s Talk To Me. 

This month, Rialto Channel will be providing the thrills and chills for your Friday night in with ‘Friday Night Frights: Indie Horrors’, a series of excellent, inventive modern horrors from the fringes of the cinema world. Up first, this hair-raising, sci-fi-inflected paranoiac nightmare, grounded by a stunning performance from Evil Dead Rise’s Lily Sullivan.

A couple years back I wrote about the New Zealand kids’ TV series Freaky, a short lived, shoestring short horror serial that managed to produce some genuinely scary, traumatic stuff. Namely, there’s an episode called “Photo” which features a haunted camera whose pictures depict the spirits of a dead couple moving closer and closer to their victims, unseen. I bring this up because the opening of Monolith, a chilling monologue set against a black screen, put me in the mind of that strange little story. It brushes up against the same anxiety that piece of television did – it even features a walk on the beach, as “Photo” did. At the start of Monolith, a voice narrates a remembrance of his mother, who was plagued by fear and anxiety that someone was watching her, arriving at a climax where she discovered someone photographing her on the beach one day. So begins Monolith, a film about audio and interviewing, process and perception, conspiracy theories and chilling unknowns. The horror of Monolith is not of the ghoulish type, nor the jumpscare variety – instead, it is a slow drip of creeping cosmic dread, a portentousness that feels particularly suited to this cultural moment of fracture and disconnect, when the search for meaning in the nebulousness finds so many of us attaching ourselves to more dangerous and outlandish conspiracies by the day.

The monolith of the title – which will likely put many in mind of the iconic black monolith of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a comparison that this film ambitiously seems to invite – is referred to as a ‘brick’, a mysterious black rectangle that comes into the possession of a swathe of people around the world who can’t seem to remember how they came into possession of it. The only person we see in the film, though, is The Interviewer, a disgraced journalist who has turned to podcasting in order to salvage her flailing career. As played by Lily Sullivan in a tremendous solo performance, the Interviewer is impulsive, selfish, a sceptic; a scion of wealthy parents cut loose by her paper after failing to corroborate her sources on a major article. Slumming it in a dubious conspiracy podcasting network, the Interviewer finds herself on the trail of these mysterious monoliths, hoping to deduce their origin and intention, only to find a far wider and more sinister plot than she could’ve imagined. 

Part of the joy of Monolith is best experienced going in with as little detail as possible, so I’ll keep details to a minimum. Suffice to say that the film’s elegant script, by writer Lucy Campbell, is an exacting but thrillingly elusive thing, sketching out details without ever revealing the full picture. The Interviewer’s personal circumstances intertwine with the mystery of the bricks in compelling fashion, and the question of what is reality and what isn’t is only magnified by the fact that her presence is the only one we can actually see on screen. Director Vesely makes great use of the one-location conceit – much of the film is simply listening, or audio editing, or puttering around the house, but every shot carries a loaded feeling of foreboding. The Interviewer is staying at her parents’ house somewhere in rural Australia, a giant concrete and glass monstrosity that suggests cold, absent wealth. The giant pane windows that line one side of the house remain a great source of tension throughout – we are constantly eyeing the background, seeking a fright that may never come. A sequence involving automatic blinds raising after a long night, one by one, had me squirming in my chair. 

The somewhat muted reception Monolith experienced upon its initial release was perhaps to be expected, its claustrophobic setting and slow-burn unease a less popular mode of horror than the more aggressive frights of, to use the obvious example, Talk to Me. But the film’s subtleties are what ensure its resonance – this is not a film of momentary terror but of the gripping, unknown fear that drives people to conspiracies in the first place. In seeking an easy answer to the murkiness of existence, we may inadvertently find ourselves falling victim to the very chaos we try to subdue. 

Monolith premieres Friday May 3 at 8:30pm exclusively on Rialto Channel. 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER