Monica Review: Andrea Pallaoro’s Artful and Poignant Look at Trans Alienation

Andrea Pallaoro’s Monica bursts out of the gate with a shot that announces its distinctive style: a protracted close-up of the eponymous character (Trace Lysette) in a tanning bed, throbbing music playing in the background. Before a word is even uttered, Pallaoro’s film, which was shot in full frame, articulates how stifled Monica is by the world. But the observational nature of the shot also signals Pallaoro’s approach to the narrative, as Monica’s painterly compositions and intricate blocking invite viewers to study the body language of its reticent characters in order to understand them and their mysterious pasts.

On the surface, the film follows Monica, a trans woman, as she returns home after a very long absence in order to reconnect with her estranged and dying mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson), who had disowned Monica for, generally speaking, failing to accept her sexuality. But Pallaoro and co-writer Orlando Tirado put a powerful twist on this routine premise, which is redolent of Christian Petzold’s Phoenix. Monica’s appearance has changed in the years since she left home, and—unlike Monica’s brother, Paul (Joshua Close), and his wife, Laura (Emily Browning)—Eugenia is unaware of who Monica is and believes that she’s a caregiver, as she’s suffering from a brain tumor that’s impairing her cognitive function.

Monica is an unsentimental exploration of its main character’s search for personal fulfillment through human connection, outlining Monica’s alienation by way of small details that are made palpable by the constraining aspect ratio. While the film never explicitly states precisely what she does, Monica is seen arranging dates as a sex worker and, at one point, briefly performing a webcam show—a tell that all her relationships are fleeting and transactional in nature. Even Lysette’s elegantly restrained performance conveys a feeling of isolation from those around Monica, as the character becomes withdrawn and standoffish when interacting with others.

That makes the ostensibly ordinary or offhand gestures of familial affection, when they do come, all the more charged with an emotional urgency. Perhaps the most notable example of this comes with a mere touch, when Monica gives Eugenia a tender backrub late in the film. The moment is also laced with an achingly bittersweet nature, as Monica has finally reconnected with her mother, though under false pretenses and without having gained her acceptance.

But for all of its poignancy, Monica can feel impenetrable to a fault. The script’s stinginess when it comes to revealing crucial information is intentional, but it’s a stubbornness that gates the audience from deeper insights into the characters. At one point in the film, Monica is stood up by a date, leading her to leave him a heated voicemail in which she states that she’s not his “experiment.” In this moment, a lucid window is opened into Monica’s lived experience as a trans woman—in this case, Monica’s dealings with men—that’s never really opened again.

While this withholding may sporadically frustrate, it hardly blunts the effect of what is ultimately a beguiling exercise in formalism. Through Pallaoro’s carefully crafted visual language, almost every unspoken gesture and movement is emphasized to the point that they become akin to pieces of a puzzle that we must sort out to form a portrait of the main character. Which is to say that Monica is a rare cinematic experience where the style is the substance.