I’ve never considered myself an intellectual snob, and I don’t think that European or any other art house has an obvious advantage over the Hollywood mainstream, as both bad and brilliant things can be found there and there. But very often it happens (and recently more and more often) that entertaining movies are more honest with the viewer. Yes, it frankly does not pretend to be something big, but only seeks to entertain, surprise and please the public, and does it, to a large extent, qualitatively (which has been the main goal of cinema since its origins). But the art house (especially the new wave) in its desire to get as far away from the viewer’s pleasure and the standards of the Hollywood mainstream, causes the opposite effect, since most often these creations are arrogant towards the same viewer (don’t understand – your problem), wildly pretentious, incredibly boring, and, as a result, simply empty. Moreover, I am not talking about pleasing the tastes of the average undemanding philistines, the crowd running for tastelessness such as the ever-memorable “Twilight”, author’s cinema and another look should always be, but I just try to distinguish a really innovative and talented thing from pretentious-snobbish hulk.
Alas, after watching the new film by Danish director Kristoffer Bohe, who thundered in Cannes with his Reconstruction (2003), my impressions were not the best. The description of the film can be put in one line - the husband is jealous of his wife and goes crazy. And besides this, nothing really happens on the screen, only boring conversations, surveillance, self-harm, nudity (mostly very dubious) and all other components of modern festival cinema. All this is seasoned with extremely pathetic and pompous speeches about the relationship between Men and Women, Truth and Lies, and the mood swings of the characters and the themes of dialogues change on the screen without any logic, suddenly and wrongly. Along the way, Bohe clearly wants to mortify Von Trier, at the same time stealing ideas from Andrzej Zulawski’s “Obsession”, but there is no expression, no hardness, no bright, deep atmosphere, just as there is no interesting and vivid study of the dark sides of the personality, as well as explosive catharsis. There is a rather boring, even some TV and very pale camera work, giving a couple of good shots of winter Denmark, a monstrously boring and predictable narrative and a simple, three-kopeck script without much frills.
This film, along with the recent “Sleeping Beauty” is a typical representative of modern pseudo-intellectual cinema, in which the director will not just remove a single frame, everything he supposedly meaningful and profound to the limit, and in fact boring and empty. For me personally, "The Monster" remained an extremely toothless, fresh and very high-flown thing, in which only beautiful opening credits are remembered.
4 out of 10