Gareth Edwards makes alien creatures feel at home in a patient, absorbing road romance. The border politics need more thought, and the pace sometimes slackens, but Monsters earns its quiet approach to science fiction.
Gareth Edwards’s Monsters is good science fiction for an evening when we would rather spend time in an unfamiliar place than watch it being demolished. It follows Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), with a road journey and a tentative romance taking precedence over creature attacks. The title might suggest a more aggressive film, but the patience mostly pays off. The director makes the aliens seem settled into a landscape where people still have lives to get on with.
As cinematographer and production designer, Gareth Edwards makes the surroundings worth our attention. The location photography has a looseness that makes the journey feel discovered, while the production design gives the creatures a place among ordinary human surroundings. The effects are convincing because they belong in these images, with little sense that the scenery has been arranged merely to display them. There is pleasure in looking around the frame, even when the story offers little immediate reason to hurry.
Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able are good at keeping the relationship from seeming like the sole purpose of the trip. They allow for an awkwardness that suits two people whose closeness is still uncertain, and neither performance demands that we find them irresistible. The trouble comes when Gareth Edwards’s writing asks their conversation to carry too much of the film. Some of it is so undemonstrative that the characters become harder to distinguish than they should be.
We felt an unexpected shiver when the giant, squidlike creatures appeared. Their infrequent appearances give us time to register their strangeness instead of simply waiting for the next attack, and the effects hold up to that attention. Jon Hopkins’s music deepens the unease without treating every quiet stretch as preparation for an attack. The creatures are the clearest reason to see the film, even though the director is right to keep them out of much of it.
Colin Goudie’s editing is sympathetic to the travelling and the developing attachment, giving both more room than a succession of shocks would allow. That is often welcome, although there are stretches when the film seems to be waiting for the relationship to acquire more weight. At 94 minutes it is short, but it does not always feel brisk. We would not ask for more attacks; a little more precision in the exchanges between the two travellers would do.
The US–Mexico border gives the story a political meaning that the film hardly needs to underline. Alien creatures, immigration anxiety and the question of who gets treated as an intruder make a fairly easy connection, and the film does too little to complicate it. The people who live in this region deserve more attention than the travelling couple’s story allows them. Because the setting feels persuasively inhabited, we notice how little we learn about those inhabitants.
Within science fiction, its willingness to leave the creatures at the edge of the human story is refreshing, though quietness alone would not be enough. The images and the hesitant affection supply enough interest to forgive the occasional drift. We recommend it to anyone happy to let a journey take precedence over an explanation. If tonight calls for a sustained siege, choose something else.
