Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alejandro Fadel
Starring: Tania Casciani, Esteban Bigliardi, Sofia Palomino
With his striking opening scene, writer/director
Alejandro Fadel certainly grabs our attention. After some shots of
blood spattered sheep, Fadel's camera holds on the image of a woman whose
throat has just been slit as she vainly attempts to prevent her head from
falling off her shoulders.
Decapitated heads pile up in Murder Me, Monster, as the women of a small rural Andes community are preyed upon by someone
or something that likes to separate their noggins from their necks. It's not
a spoiler to say that it's a something rather than a someone that's
responsible, as early on we see a woman attacked by what appears to be a
long tentacle that wraps itself around her throat.
The woman in question was the married lover of police officer Cruz (Victor Lopez, who resembles a half-melted snowman and whose voice is so deep you might
want to turn down your subwoofer to stop the cutlery from dancing in your
kitchen drawers). Her husband, David (Esteban Bigliardi), is
immediately identified as the prime suspect, given his mental issues, and he
doesn't do himself any favours with his babbling about possessing a psychic
connection with a mythical monster. Cruz is convinced that David isn't the
killer and begins his own investigations, which lead him to believe that his
little community is indeed home to something extra-terrestrial.
Earlier this year we saw writer/director Jim Cummings mine a similar idea
with much success in
The Wolf of Snow Hollow. Both films use the backdrop of a possible creature menacing a wintry
small town to deliver a character study of a troubled cop. But the two
movies are hemispheres apart in both geography and tone. Where Cummings'
film was a black comedy, Fadel plays his drama so straight that it
ironically becomes difficult to take seriously. With its snowy setting,
Murder Me, Monster plays like a South American cousin of
Scandinavia's Nordic Noir movement, all moody shots of snow-capped mountains
and taciturn, miserable inhabitants.
For a Latin-American example of how this approach can yield impressive
results, take a look at Amat Escalante's
The Untamed. But that movie had a big advantage over Fadel's in presenting us with
intriguing, three dimensional characters. As a protagonist, Cruz is one of
the least interesting I've come across in some time. He never seems all that
bothered by the events surrounding him, even when his own lover becomes a
victim. This may be Fadel's way of making us question if perhaps Cruz is
himself the killer, but the monster is revealed so early that we know that
simply isn't the case. I found myself compelled to reach into the screen and
smack some life into Cruz. It's as though Fadel set himself the challenge of
creating cinema's most boring leading man, and he comes pretty close.
Murder Me, Monster gets by on its brooding visuals to a
point, but eventually you realise that there's really very little going on
beneath the surface here and it's essentially just a standard monster movie
with a decidedly po-faced approach. It occasionally comes alive with some
sub Twin Peaks quirkiness, like the oddball police chief who
screams "Forensics" into the distance whenever he arrives on a fresh crime
scene, and the influence of Lynch is audible in Alex Nante's lush and
moody score. By the time the monster is revealed in all its b-movie glory,
you wonder how we were ever expected to take any of this as seriously as the
filmmakers would have liked.
