Critics reviews

Monsters does for the CGI generation what George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead did for 1960s horror: takes a series of increasingly tired conventions and reinvents them.

Both the satire and the human story are more involving than in District 9, and McNairy, in particular, gives an excellent and very convincing performance. This is a very postmodern sci-fi, with its downbeat approach to the monsters themselves, but with a hugely involving love story.

Visually and sonically, his film should be the envy of shoestring guerrilla filmmakers the world over. It’s a gorgeous and unsettling ride, a road movie about an almost-romance, with the threat of the unknown hanging in the air, and an ending, both beautiful and elegantly scary, that sends shivers down the spine.

Desperate comparisons have been made with ‘District 9’ and ‘Cloverfield’ (not least by the film’s own marketing), but the digitally enhanced texture of the atmospheric ‘Monsters’ – with its weatherbeaten signs, barely glimpsed creatures and edgy encounters – evokes a sweaty, nervous reality rather than a clean, hard-edged artificiality.

Gareth Edwards, who got his start as a digital-effects designer, reportedly shot this UK horror feature for only $15,000, using “off-the-shelf” cameras and production equipment. The result is notably dim and flat on a big screen, and the giant-monster scenes, often cloaked in darkness, are few and disappointing.

“Monsters” holds our attention ever more deeply as we realize it’s not a casual exploitation picture. We expect that sooner or later, we’ll get a good look at the aliens close up. When we do, let’s say it’s not a disappointment. They’re ugly and uncannily beautiful. We’ve never seen anything like them. And their motives are made clear in a sequence combining uncommon suspense and uncanny poetry.

Monsters is a very human drama, and a forgiving one, at that. Nobody here – not the military, not the border businessmen who determine who stays and who goes, not even the monsters – are really monsters. That, too, may sound banal, but that's my fault and not that of the film, which is a startlingly original and haunting take on our ageless fear of otherness.

“Monsters” is an attempt to counter noisy, hyper effects-laden alien invasion flicks with something teasing, indie and good for you. Instead, it’s like a pendulum swing too far in the other direction.

Despite a clunky immigration message (“We’re imprisoning ourselves,” says the photographer, surveying the gargantuan blockade on the border of the quarantined zone), “Monsters” effortlessly compels. The ending may be pure sci-fi schmaltz, but it’s schmaltz that this viewer, at least, could believe in.

Like District 9, Edwards’s film avoids nuanced analysis because it would thoroughly muck up the sci-fi conceit at play, a situation that thus negates any mature interest in the issues at hand. That’s finally a near-fatal problem for the proceedings, given that its superficial action mainly involves two dullards roaming Mexican jungles and, later on, Texas suburbs, all the while avoiding contact with intergalactic beings...