Schmo is the personal website of Stuart Curran, a UK-based designer.

Monos

A visually stunning Columbian film that crosses Apocalypse Now with Lord of the Flies.

 

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The best film of the year by a vertical mile. Monos is a stunning movie that works on so many levels at once and stays with you, in your head, for days afterwards. 

The film opens above the clouds somewhere in the mountains of Columbia where we meet a group of kids playing football blindfolded. This everyday activity has been transplanted from its usual setting and reimagined just like the kids themselves. 

They form a cell in a guerilla network with the sole duty of guarding a captive for “the Organisation”, a woman known only as “Doctorra”. They are visited by the ”Messenger” who drills them and ensures that discipline remains intact. Their teenage rebelliousness persists however and after a night of partying on the mountain, they accidentally kill a cow that they have been entrusted with. This symbolic death begins the descent both literally and metaphorically as individual liberties collide with collective responsibility in an existential thriller that never lets you rest. 

Despite the lack of adults, this is also deeply moving film about family. The families that are missing in the kids lives, the everyday rituals remembered and replayed from cultural memory but transformed by the strange context of their world. The disciplinarian father figure against whom revenge is imagined and the seemingly passive mother figure whose depth of strength and resolve is underestimated. The longing for escape to real family and not the artificial constructed identity afforded by the organisation.

All this plays out a truly cinematic scale, soundtracked by a freakishly awesome score from Mica Levi that reminds you of the insanely strange yet somehow recognisable situation you are watching unspool.

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