Yet more and more each day, we are wanting to distance ourselves from that time like it never happened, and tend to be vaguely irked by reminders of it -- like it's something we did wrong and are embarrassed to talk about again.
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. However, I'm telling you of a new way I was reminded of this last night.
It goes without saying that we don't want to see movies about COVID. As I was flicking through the options for this year's MIFF yesterday -- and I was going to write a post about the dearth of exciting options, until I realized I'd already written essentially the same post this time last year -- I saw one that was about the panic that overtakes the medical staff of a hospital as all their patients get COVID. I clicked away from that movie as quickly as my wrist could manage it.
But the movie I chose to watch last night, Matt Vesely's 2022 film Monolith, was a different reminder of COVID. It isn't overtly about COVID, though there is a plot point about a disease that is spread by sound. Rather, it's a movie that was made with COVID restrictions in mind, that likely would have been conceived differently if COVID hadn't been a thing.
You know it when you see it, instinctively. The movie has comparatively few actors and locations. In fact, Monolith has one actor and one location.
It took me about 15 minutes to realize that actress Lily Sullivan was the only actor we had seen on screen, and the rest of the characters were only voices we heard over telephones, their stories recorded for this podcaster who looks into the paranormal.
Before we get too much further, I should tell you something about this Australian actress.
I have something of a fascination with Lily Sullivan, given that she served as a muse for the street artist Rone in an unforgettable exhibit we saw. Rone's thing is to paint large portraits on the walls of mouldering mansions, among the detritus of an abandoned society life from 100 years in the past, which appears to have been interrupted by some unnamed apocalypse in which all the people vanished. These necessarily temporary exhibits are usually housed in buildings that have been left to decay but are about to be refurbished into something else, though we've also seen an exhibit of Rone's in a proper gallery that was just made up to look like one of these buildings.
Here are a couple images from the exhibit we saw, Empire, all of which feature Sullivan:
This last we actually bought as a separate piece of art that is now framed and hanging in our house. Yes, that's a library on the back wall that has Sullivan's face painted on the spines of the books, and the room is half submerged in water. Pretty impressive stuff.
This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about today, but I'm including it as a general shout out to the work of Rone, and an acknowledgement of the fact that this work has elevated Sullivan in my mind as having this sort of mythic, preternatural, transcendental beauty.
Anyway, she's a decent actress too, the type who can could carry a whole movie if need be. (She was in a television remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock that we liked, as well.)
In COVID, Sullivan did need to do this, and it was this movie.
I might be able to look on the internet to learn whether writer Lucy Campbell always had this sort of script in mind, or wrote it specifically to film during COVID. I'm assuming the latter, but it may not be true. I will say that the director, Matt Vesely, gives everything a highly accomplished sense of style and visual energy, which is probably why it took me so long to glom on to the fact that there was only one actor we were seeing on screen.
However, once I did, I realized I was having a bit harder time focusing on what the people on the other end of these phone conversations were giving us in terms of the story. There was a lot of rewinding and relistening. They're steadily building up a narrative about these mysterious black bricks that have been given to them over the course of years and maybe even decades, that have a sort of hypnotizing effect over them and may even be alien in nature. That's all I'll say in terms of the story, as Monolith is good enough for me to avoid spoiling it, and for me to marginally recommend that you see it.
The recommendation is only marginal because I ultimately found that I wanted, maybe needed, to see the faces of these people in order for their words to sink in with me more, and for them to have more dimension in my imagination than still photos we see of them. The story is meant to chill us, but I found that outside of a few select moments, it came up to the edge of being chilling but then stopped short. There was too much of a disconnect, a distance.
The kind of disconnect and distance we had in COVID.
In the process, I discovered that not only do I not really want to be reminded of COVID in movies, I don't really want to be reminded of the "COVID movie," i.e. the movie made under COVID restrictions, either.
Monolith is doing a similar thing to what Andrew Patterson's more successful 2019 film The Vast of Night is doing. Only that movie doesn't operate under the same restrictions, as one of its most memorable moments is this impossible long take that travels through a part of the small town where the movie is set. The sort of shot that just wouldn't have played if you're trying to make a movie where the cast and crew don't catch each other's diseases.
We can't fault Monolith for being made at the time it was made, of course. In fact, just think how bereft we might have felt at that time, if no one had tried to make any cinema during any of the various lockdowns. We needed these movies to sustain us, to remind us that the outside world still existed, that art still existed.
Unfortunately, we don't need them so much anymore, and maybe we won't like them as much as we should for reasons that are not their fault.
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