Review: Monos Is a Superficial, Hedonistic Riff on Lord of the Flies

The South American landscape of Alejandro Landes’s Monos is as temperamental as the paramilitary fighters who populate the film. The youngest soldiers are barely adolescent, while the oldest may be in their early 20s. They’re introduced playing soccer blindfolded, training their ears to locate a ball that makes a jangly sound whenever it’s kicked. They live on a lush mountainside that’s fortified with a set of ragged concrete bunkers, which offer them minimal protection from the elements. Dense fog, heavy downpours, and layers of clouds hang over them as they fumble aimlessly toward an elusive goal.

These fighters, who have names like Boom Boom (Sneider Castro), Leidi (Karen Quintero), Lobo (Julián Giraldo), and Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), serve a group referred to only as the Organization, and they take their orders from a diminutive man named Mensajero (Wilson Salazar), or the Messenger. He arrives early in Monos, whipping this ragtag, androgynous crew into shape with training exercises that directly reference Claire Denis’s Beau Travail. Like much of the film, the montage unfurls in a discordant rhythm, mixing roving, Emmanuel Lubezki-style tracking shots with more frantically edited images of body parts in motion.

Mensajero’s visit is quick, but it’s all business. The group films a proof-of-life video of a prisoner, Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), and Mensajero reaffirms the unit’s hierarchy, approves a “partnership” between two members, and leaves them with a milking cow that’s to be returned later to a local rancher aiding their cause. Upon Mensajero’s departure, the days become increasingly unstructured and anarchic as the young fighters party, screw, drink, and fire assault weapons into the sky. Their prisoner, who they refer to as Doctora, occasionally is welcomed into their activities, but she’s clearly desperate for release.

The film’s title translates from Spanish to Monkeys, but it also gestures to the hermetic and isolated world Landes is portraying. Monos pointedly avoids asking how these teens came to bear arms, who they’re working for, why they have a captive, and what they’re meant to do with her. Instead, Landes puts an intense, at times hallucinogenic magnifying glass on the dynamics of this rather undifferentiated group of soldiers and their vacillations between camaraderie and outright rebellion. The film’s immersive qualities amplify its sense of dislocation. It’s never clear whether these soldiers are paid or enslaved, whether they have any investment in whatever cause it is they’re serving, and if their acts of rebellion are petty outbursts or the logical endpoint of some long-running trauma.

In this way, the film recalls Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama as a study of young terrorists divorced from any clear sense of motive, but Bonello’s film was at once evasive and allusive, housing its inaction in a mecca of consumerist culture. There are intimations of pansexuality among the young soldiers, but this feels part and parcel with Monos’s rather superficial, hedonistic riff on Lord of the Flies. Any sense of conflict in the film is utterly aesthetic, and whatever meaning its heightened atmosphere conjures is almost entirely due to Mica Levi’s score, an even stranger beast than her revelatory work on Jackie and Under the Skin. Levi incorporates the chatter of insects and the soldiers’ birdcalls into her willfully erratic soundtrack, which often begins in choral tones that ascend into abstract chaos.

The film mimics this pattern after a series of mishaps in the mountains, punctuated by a military attack on the Organization’s territory that disrupts what little sense of order remains among the unit. They set up a new camp in the jungle and attempt to go rogue, ignoring radio communiques from Mensajero and chaining their prisoner to a tree under the newly self-appointed leader, Patagrande (Moisés Arias), or Bigfoot. Landes further heightens the film’s sense of abstraction and dislocation in the jungle, emphasizing the inability of the soldiers to keep tabs on one another. This metaphorical descent into the wild is contrasted by plot action that grows increasingly tedious, as the broadly undifferentiated soldiers (only Arias, frightening in his ruthless amorality, leaves much of an impression) waver in their loyalties.

When one soldier strays, discovering an empathetic family willing to offer him a spot in their home, Landes uses a TV broadcast to belatedly afford Monos some real-world socio-political context. The deftness with which a news story about Gummy Bears illustrates a forbidding local economy is striking, but if this scene intends to offer a reason why youths have abandoned their families and morals to submit themselves to a shadowy chain of command, it’s inadequate. Landes’s final shot also attempts to evoke the trauma of endless, pointless war, but it feels particularly glib in the face of a film that otherwise is only concerned with depicting amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.