2022 Monolith

• Directed by Matt Vesely
• Written by Lucy Campbell
• Stars Lily Sullivan, Damon Herriman, Ling Cooper Tang
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 34 Minutes
• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG-pPBUiXu8

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

For such a simple premise, and being about one actor in one house, this was surprisingly good. It builds steadily, getting more suspenseful and weirder as it goes. Lily Sullivan is excellent, which is good since she’s the only one we ever see – the rest of the cast are voices. We both liked it a lot.

Spoilery Synopsis

A man tells a story about how his family is a bit unusual. A man followed them for years, taking thousands of photos of the family. Still, he has no evidence of this at all. No, wait, the man telling the story is a nut. We zoom out to see an Interviewer talking to the crazy man for her podcast. She says she’s going to tell us a story, all we have to do is listen. Credits roll. 

We watch as the Interviewer apologizes for a mistake she made in checking out some sources for a news story. “Beyond Believable” is her show, where she exposes the “truth” behind conspiracies, hoaxes, and such. 

She gets an email that has a number for Floramae King, but she doesn’t know why. She calls the number and asks about a “brick.”  King says the brick changed her life. Twenty years ago, she was having a hard time in life, but then she received a black brick. The brick was taken from her and sold to an art dealer. Even today, she can still feel “the power” from the brick after all these years. 

She calls Mr. Lang, the art collector. He admits that he has several of these bricks. He received one when he was young, and he’s been collecting them since. He knows of at least a dozen in existence. The interior of each brick consists of hundreds of symbols overlaid and folded onto each other. He feels that his original brick was meant just for him, it’s connected to him somehow. He also talks about an ugly creature he once encountered, but he also felt that it was his brother. After that, he got the brick. He’s very convincing until he offers to sell her one of his bricks. 

She talks to Scott, who says she needs a break, especially after getting fired from her job. This new podcast isn’t working out for her. Who sent that anonymous email in the first place? She publishes what she’s got and asks if any listeners know anything more about these bricks. Her boss, Tyler, likes what she’s sent him. 

Sure enough, a woman contacts her about another brick. Laura got hers about two years ago. She gets visions from hers, and she also loses time once in a while. It’s trying to tell her, “Something awful is coming.” She can’t talk about where she got the rock. 

The Interviewer continues to do interviews and research, and she starts her own “crazy wall.” Several callers say the bricks are dangerous and should not be spoken of, the podcast itself may be causing trouble. “You need to stop what you’re doing– you’re in danger now!” 

Mr. Lang, the art dealer, sends her some volumetric scans of the interiors of the bricks, and they are very weird. She sends them to Scott, who’s a linguist. The markings inside look like a language, but nothing he recognizes. 

She gets a USB drive in a box on her doorstep. It holds a video of a little girl’s ninth birthday party, where she got a brick. Except… that was her birthday party. Who sent that? 

She calls Lang, who denies sending her the information. He’s got a video of the bricks in his vault. He senses his dead brother in the vault. There’s screams on the phone and then it goes dead. 

She talks to a reporter who did an article on a viral disease that travels through sound. People went crazy after hearing about a certain thing. She warns that publishing what she knows could be dangerous, and not everything needs to be told. 

The Interviewer starts getting ill and is clearly very disturbed by all this. Is she going crazy? She finds that Floramae King used to work for her family, and they’re the one who stole the brick from her. She’s been involved in this from her childhood. Floramae claims she didn’t know that the Interviewer was the family’s child. We find out that there was a whole lot of drama that went on back in the day. 

The Interviewer calls her father, who knows all about the brick. She admits to the incident that got Floramae fired all those years ago; she was jealous of Paula, Floramae’s daughter, and lied about damaging some furniture. The incident ended up ruining Paula’s life. She admits to destroying the furniture herself. Or did she? The brick may have been behind it all. 

Suddenly, she gets sick and pukes up… a brick. She takes a hammer to it and breaks it to pieces. A bit later, she gets a vision of herself, and it crushes her audio recorder with one hand. She runs outside and hides from her other self. They fight with each other, and one kills the other. We don’t know which was which. 

All cleaned up, she tells her story to the audience. 

Brian’s Commentary

“Let’s make a horror movie about a magic rock!” It’s an unsolved mystery/conspiracy theory/unexplained phenomenon story that’s more mystery/sci-fi than horror, but it’s very cool. 

The idea of the sound-based illness is very reminiscent of “Pontypool” (2009) but other than that, the story is very different. 

That’s a nice podcast setup! The film has only one character who ever appears on screen, mostly in her apartment, but we do get some glimpses and flashbacks to other places from time to time. 

There’s almost no action, but it’s an interesting mystery to follow along to the end. In the end, we don’t really get an explanation, but it’s all very strange and weird. 

Kevin’s Commentary

I thought it was very effective just having one character, and how we never learned her name through the whole thing. The build is well done, layering on the mystery gradually. It was all around very cool.