Monster movie review: Mohanlal’s cringey acting as a Sikh rivals the script’s creepy homophobia

Language: Malayalam with some Hindi and Punjabi  Cast: Mohanlal, Honey Rose, Sudev Nair, Lakshmi Manchu, Leena, K.B. Ganeshkumar, Siddique, Johny Antony        Director: Vysakh Star rating: 0.25/5 Sikhs, Punjabis and homosexuals are not viewed as people by the team of Monster. Instead, they’re seen as gimmicks, tools to build suspense and write grand reveals in a crime drama. Full marks to director Vysakh and writer Uday Krishna for being consistent in this new Malayalam film – consistently cringeworthy. Monster begins with a women-drivers-only taxi service sending Bhamini (Honey Rose) to ferry a client named Lucky Singh ( Mohanlal ) around Kochi. When they meet, she is put off by his over-familiarity. Almost as off-putting as Lucky’s flirtatious, creepy conduct with a woman young enough to be his child and a stranger mistaking her for his wife, is the veteran actor hamming his way through the role of a Sikh and pretending to be a natural Punjabi speaker though his awkwardness with the language is glaring. Lalettan in Monster sprinkling Punjabi and Hindi in his conversations with Malayalis in Kerala who do not know either is as ridiculous as Suresh Gopi ’s character in the recent Mei Hoom Moosa peppering his sentences with Hindi in a village in the state. It is contrived, unrealistic and truly silly. Next in Monster, an alleged crime occurs, a probe follows and fugitives are apprehended.

After a terrible first half, there is for a short while in the second half some excitement generated about the possible identity of the various parties involved and the motivations of the criminals, but no aspect of Monster is so effective as to overshadow its unfailingly superficial script, generic treatment, crudeness, clumsy dialogues and Mohanlal’s self-conscious acting. At one point, Monster decides to bat for LGBT-plus rights. It should have spared the world the effort because, as we learn from watching this film, a closet homophobe faking progressiveness can be worse than open homophobia. The characterisation of the homosexual individuals in Monster and the awful acting are both geared to fit prevailing prejudices. The writer is confused, misinformed and ignorant about laws regarding marriage and same-gender relationships in India. He compounds this grievous laxness towards his theme with an apparent cluelessness about the difference between legal sanction and social acceptance. Certain characters spout lines that are purportedly considerate towards homosexuality, yet their vocabulary is never free of an us-vs-them mentality.

Certain aspects of Monster reminded me of a horrendous Hindi film called Girlfriend released in 2004 in which the lead was a murderous, kickboxing, mobike-riding lesbian who – to top off the stereotypes – chopped her long hair part way through the narrative, and in the end was revealed to be (wait for it!) Christian. The saving grace in that episode was that Girlfriend’s writer-director Karan Razdan was a marginal player who never made it big in films, just like its stars Isha Koppikkar, Amrita Arora and Aashish Chaudhary. It is a matter of shame that Vysakh, in contrast, is the hugely successful maker of the blockbusters Pokkiri Raja and _Pulimurugan_ , Uday Krishna is his equally successful, long-time collaborator, and Mohanlal, as one of the foremost names in Malayalam cinema history, is clearly not struggling to get offers. What then is this trio’s excuse for creating a film as horrifically regressive as Monster? One of the heartening facets of contemporary Malayalam cinema has been the normalisation of Kerala’s religious minorities. This month though has been a sad reminder that Malayalam filmmakers are not free of bigotry and play-it-safe trickery. Exhibit A: the Islamophobia in Mei Hoom Moosa. Exhibit B: a homophobic filmmaker pointedly identifying the homosexuals in Monster as Christian, thus protecting himself from the anger of majoritarian elements in the audience in a largely anti-LGBT society. In doing this, Vysakh follows in the footsteps of not just the obscure Girlfriend, but also Pan Nalin’s much-acclaimed Hindi-English film _Angry Indian Goddesses_ (2015). The stereotyping of LGBT-plus persons in Monster is unrelenting. A lesbian couple are filmed through an unapologetically lascivious lens – bosoms heaving as they hungrily tear into each other with their eyes before their bodies collide with an animal fervour, unmindful of the company in the room – in a scene evidently designed to cater to a common cis-heterosexual male fantasy of watching women make love to each other. In a country where conservatives often describe homosexuality as a “Western concept”, Monster even has an English song playing in the background while summarising a same-gender romance in the storyline. In its choice of title, Monster mirrors the likes of the Tamil thriller Ratsasan (Demon / 2018), which villainised a man who, in fact, deserved audience empathy for the oppression he had faced all his life. “It takes a monster to destroy a monster,” says the trailer of Vysakh’s film, while aiming its fire at people whose unlawful activities were born of the extreme persecution they had suffered. In case you don’t get the point, in the end the supposed good guy in Monster makes a statement to this effect: “It is not the circumstances of the criminal but justice for the victim that is the responsibility of law enforcers.” I guess we can safely conclude what his stand would have been if he was a character in Victor Hugo’s French classic Les Miserables and witnessed a poor man stealing bread for a starving family. The lack of nuance, sensitivity and basic humanity in Monster is staggering. Rating: 0.25 (out of 5 stars) 

This review was first published in October 2022 when Monster was released in theatres. The film is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar.

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.