Alejandro Landes Echavarría makes fear physical, watching people test how much power they have over one another. We rate Monos highly for its performances, though its reluctance to explain the war leaves important questions unanswered.
Fi1m perspective
On the mountain in Monos (2019), teenage soldiers train, compete and make up rules for living together. Alejandro Landes Echavarría watches them test their power over Doctora, the captive played by Julianne Nicholson. We were frightened by their uncertain rules because Nicholson makes us feel how little protection their captive has. It is a disturbing, engrossing film, and its performances earn the attention that its elaborate imagery demands.
Landes began in documentary with Cocalero (2007), then made his first fiction feature, Porfirio (2011). That docufiction portrait of a real man kept his fiction close to documentary. Monos, his second fiction feature, takes him from contained, intimate framing towards a much larger scale. Its mixture of physical immediacy and stylisation is where we find him most persuasive, provided the performances remain the reason to watch.
His collaborators include cinematographers Jasper Wolf and Thimios Bakatakis, and composer Mica Levi. Photography, sound and music give Monos its physical force, though the elaborate images could easily overwhelm the people within them. Landes's work with the young ensemble prevents that: their performances are unforced, and their attempts to organise themselves remain tense enough to keep us watching. The film gives us teenagers who have authority before they know how to exercise it.
Nicholson keeps us aware of the harm this group can do, since Doctora cannot choose to stop participating in its experiments. Her alertness makes the danger concrete without dictating how we should feel about her captors. The screenplay, by Landes and Alexis Dos Santos, is less satisfying: it tells us too little about the larger conflict that has put these people together. We need enough context to understand what sustains this war, and Landes's preference for ambiguity leaves that need unmet. Start with Monos, but do not expect Landes to explain everything he makes frightening.
Biography
Alejandro Landes Echavarría is a Colombian-Ecuadorian film director, producer, screenwriter and journalist. Born in 1980 in São Paulo, Brazil, to a Colombian mother and Ecuadorian father, he studied political economy at Brown University, graduating in 2003. Before filmmaking, he worked as an assistant producer on the television programme Oppenheimer Presenta and wrote for the Miami Herald.
His feature films include the 2007 documentary Cocalero, which premiered at Sundance, and the 2011 drama Porfirio, which screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Landes directed, wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay for Monos (2019), a drama that premiered at Sundance and was Colombia's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
