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PLOT: When a young woman working as a moderator for an online video streamer blocks a mysterious video, she and her colleagues are terrorized by a malicious entity.
REVIEW: Monitor is one of the buzzier horror titles to play SXSW this year. Produced by Temple Hill, the same folks behind Smile, it’s the kind of movie that could easily tap into the zeitgeist and become the next really popular mainstream horror franchise — if it’s acquired by the right people. While many will compare it to A Nightmare on Elm Street, as it introduces a character that has the potential to become another Freddy Krueger, to me it feels similar to a later Wes Craven movie, Shocker, substituting doomscrolling online video for terrestrial cable as the preferred method of transport for our mysterious killer.
In Monitor, rising scream queen Brittany O’Grady (It’s What’s Inside) stars as Maggie, a young woman who works in a remote office for a YouTube-esque company as a moderator, eliminating the most vile internet content before it gets online. Imagine the worst things anyone could post, and that’s what she sees day to day, but she and her tight-knit group of fellow moderators have built a surrogate family, where the most senior moderator, Sara Alexander’s Claudia, says they serve a higher purpose. Of course, they all toil for minimum wage, while Maggie grows increasingly disturbed that, under the company’s policy, she’s unable to report submitted content to the police (it’s a real discussion going on right now about the responsibilities companies like YouTube or OpenAI have).
Maggie receives a weird, surreal video she struggles to describe but feels inclined to delete, inadvertently unleashing hell on her and her colleagues. The video seems to contain the spirit of a malevolent “tulpa,” a being able to materialize if enough people believe in it — hence the video, which it wants to get out into the real world. One by one, Maggie’s friends start to suffer from violent attacks, mobilizing them to try and stop this entity in its tracks.
It’s a slick feature debut for directors Matt Black and Ryan Polly, with it based on their own short. Shot in 2.35:1 scope and looking like it has a relatively healthy budget, it feels like it’s aimed squarely at mainstream horror audiences, with lots of gore and some gnarly scares. The imagery used to depict the tulpa is upsetting, and the premiere screening at SXSW was filled with people who screamed at a few of the film’s more unsettling jump scares.
O’Grady is a likeable heroine, with her given a convincing backstory where her sister committed suicide after becoming a victim of the very worst the internet has to offer. She’s well supported by the maternal Alexander, while One Piece’s Taz Skylar plays her not wholly unsympathetic but duplicitous boss. Perhaps the most effective performance comes from Gunnar Willis as a jovial, nice-guy colleague who undergoes a horrifically transformative experience with the tulpa, showing real gravitas as the film reaches its conclusion.
Stylistically, it has some nice touches, including the effective use of clips from Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, which ties into the film’s premise — that a shared delusion can make something imaginary feel very real. While it’s not high-end arthouse horror in the A24 vein, the meat-and-potatoes aspect is actually refreshing and should find it many fans once it picks up distribution. With the right handling, this could be a franchise.
