Monster

If you seen the US movie "The Boy Behind the Door" then you know what I am talking about. This is literally a replica with no dialogue. Not sure if they intended for this to be a remake or not but this version is terrible. I do give kudos to the girl in the movie, she can definitely go far with her acting when she gets older. The suspense in the beginning is good at times but then I'm like, this is giving me Deja vu because I've seen this already. This movie shouldn't have been made but I guess when there's nothing else to watch on a Friday night and you want to kill time then this is it lol...

I am a fan of the idea of having a film use no dialogue. (Characters only sometimes say the names of other characters, so at least the main actors are more likely to get fairly compensated as speaking parts.) I don't mind the campy fake blood as long as there is suspense and a good storyline. Cinematography definitely had good moments of creating suspense. Only twice in the film did I find myself in a moment that seemed laughable and took me out of my immersion. One was a "The Shinning" spoof of the "Here's Johnny" scene that played out impressively well, especially by a young child actress in the place of Duvall, but even in its abbreviated form, the scene is just too long to not be a bit dull and out-of-place. The other moment was when our main character stops herself from stealing some french-fries left behind by an antagonist and pouts. I can see how they intended to make this a moment of showing human-ness and generating pity for the child, but it instead came off as an out-of-place moment of levity. I can forgive those things however. The thing that really irked me was the stereotypes used to depict the "badguy" archtype; Joint-smoking, beer-drinking gamer playing violent MMO shooters late into the night, has long unkempt hair and a black baseball cap or hoody with open jacket and ripped jeans, sustaining on cup noodle and fast food, neglecting an otherwise gorgeous home that is taken for granted and absolutely infested with cockroaches. And let's not forget this is supposed to be a child predator. It's just hitting every checkmark for a bad stereotype. When we got our second villain in the story, things started to pick up with suspense.

The no dialogue thing is an interesting take that can work, but the show is the same thing over and over. The child is painted as both brave and smart yet also quite dumb, making quick moves at opportune times yet falling for silly things that would be way more intuitive in the first place. Maybe that was intentional? But it felt inconsistent and all the characters felt a bit basic and overly stereotypical.

But more importantly for almost the entire thing there is this terrible background feed of this sort of white noise highly degraded sound that comes in and out and it genuinely was terrible. Like gave me a headache and caused my to almost watch the film on mute terrible. I created this account literally to share that this sound ruined the movie. It goes on. The entire hour and a half. It's horrible.

I regret staying up late for this.

I regret staying up late for this.

I regret staying up late for this.

I hate that stupid sound.

"Monster" is an okay movie, I guess. Wait, on second thought, it's not that great. It starts out as a rather unpleasant watch. Then after while, it gets repetitious. It never gets boring but it does get stuck in second gear. The first half of the movie is better than the second half. The no dialogue is fine for a while but then it ends up being a silly, rather ineffective gimmick. For a movie with a very friendly running time (86 minutes), "Monster" begins to feel like a long movie. 86 minutes long or not, it should have been about twenty minutes shorter. "Monster" is another straight-to-Netflix dud.

Okay, that is a tiny bit unfair, but given that most of their mainstream horror output is from legendary copy/paster Rocky Soraya, I feel like it's an appropriate joke. Monster is an Indonesian adaptation of The Boy Behind the Door, though with everything applied in a way that doesn't work quite as well when put together..... The visuals are the only good part, with some great shots and an overall suspense building aesthetic focusing on close and tight shots. There are even some well bits of swivel work that are done more than well enough, and the practicals have some satisfactory blood and violence to them. The killer doesn't really have any menace, but I feel like that's more in the overall acting and writing..... Speaking of which, the writing is one of the more lacking elements. While the lack of dialogue is a good choice, the story is very formulaic, with no actual surprises and no attempt at originality. There's very little to the characters too. No real substance to speak of..... The soundtrack feels out of tune. There's this odd western tune that always takes the viewer out of the scene, as well as some composed bits that are never timed right and never properly fit. While the sound effects work well enough, there isn't enough effort placed on them for sinister and/or unsettling effects..... The acting isn't great. The two kids, played by Anantya Kirana and Sultan Hamonangan do as good as they can, but their facial expressions are limited to either mild terror or high levels of fear, while the other two just go through their motions. The antagonists aren't exactly spooky or creepy, they're just annoying.

If you want to find out for yourself, Monster is on Netflix. If you want to save time and effort, just watch The Boy Behind the Door.