Nothing short of an aesthete’s dream, a film crammed with visual bravado that at various times echoes Kubrick, Malick, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray
Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.
Aided by “Under the Skin” composer Micah Levi’s thunderous score, Landes delivers a suspenseful encapsulation of alienated youth enmeshed in pointless battles that can only lead to further destruction.
Though Monos feels very contemporary aesthetically, its subjects are timeless: the malleability of group dynamics and how subtle changes can lead to either violence or harmony. It’s a philosophical film with very few words, examining its ideas through powerful images and feelings.
The viscerality will surely leave one shaken, though they may question if the unceasing sadistic acts on display are worth the experience.
Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.
The Hollywood Reporter by Keith Uhlich
Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
An arrestingly bizarre experience.
This is a gripping, sometimes hypnotising film in which notions of good and evil are less clear-cut than the urgent desire to stay alive.
There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.