Today’s extraordinary Korean thriller on Netflix Streaming: MONSTER (2014). An industrialist makes the mistake of trusting a blackmail payoff to an underling who would rather have the money himself. The underling goes straight to the brother he’s avoided for years, the titular monster, a stone sociopath who kills as easily as he breathes, offering him a lesser payoff in exchange for getting hold of the incriminating materials. Murders ensue, and an eight-year-old girl finds herself on the run.
At the same time, a young college student deals with her sister, a mentally retarded adult who operates a produce stand.
The stories converge. The mentally retarded girl, who is impulsive, prone to fits of bad temper, and possesses only the survival skills that would belong to a child of her age, finds herself on the run with the eight-year-old, while the bad guy — an unstoppable killing machine who can take down multiple attackers at once — tracks them both.
The first thing to note is that the film solves the biggest problem with many thrillers right away: how to keep them going without making the protagonist stupid. Well, this protagonist is mentally challenged and has focus problems that regularly cause her attention to wander when she needs to keep her mind on the danger she’s in; nor can she effectively tell the police what’s going on, nor will she come up with any brilliant plans, at any point. It is key to the story that she is almost defeated at one juncture by the need to cross town to find a given address. It is also key that the bad guy is multiple orders of magnitude more formidable than she is, physically and mentally.
But that is not the same thing as saying that she’s incapable of being dangerous…
An absolutely splendid film, ruthless in its narrative, fearless in its willingness to let bad things happen, and terrifying in its portrayal of the homicidal antagonist. It is possessed of a great early brawl between the bad guy and a thug sent to kill him, and a very bloody climax in which our heroine does NOT suddenly develop cunning or super-strength or martial arts skills– but is instead as pissed off as it’s possible for her to be. It’s not a “ballet.” It’s a scratching, screaming, clawing confrontation between somebody who deserves to prevail and someone who does not, one of the best good vs. evil finales I have seen in many, many years.
Trust me. See it NOW.
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