MONOLITH: A Sci-Fi Thriller as a One-Woman Show

“I’ll tell you a story. All you need to do is listen,” says the podcaster in “Monolith”. But do the creators of this film actually have anything interesting to say?

A young woman arrives at her family’s house in the remote Australian outback while her parents are away. Little is known about her: she is a journalist who has fallen into disgrace after her article about a corruption scandal was dismissed as fictional, based on unreliable sources. To salvage her career, she starts a podcast titled “Beyond Believable”, where she invites listeners to share mysterious phenomena: strange stories, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and the like. After receiving an anonymous email, the podcaster stumbles upon a story about a strange black brick that has inexplicably appeared in the lives of unrelated people across the globe. She makes contact with a German collector who claims to own several such objects, and scientific analysis of them has yielded surprising results.

“Monolith” is the feature-length directorial debut of Australian filmmaker Matt Vesely. It is also the first narrative film produced under “Film Lab: New Voices,” a joint initiative between the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival, aimed at showcasing the most interesting ideas from young filmmakers from the Antipodes. Three projects were selected from over sixty submissions by nearly fifty teams, but only one was greenlit for production—”Monolith”, based on a screenplay by Lucy Campbell. Most of the film’s modest budget of just under 500,000 Australian dollars was provided by SAFC and AFF. The film was produced so cheaply because it was shot in just over two weeks, on a single set, and with only one actress—Lily Sullivan, who plays the podcaster.

Sullivan, an Australian film star making a career in the U.S. [she appeared in “Evil Dead Rise” (2023) by Lee Cronin and the series “Barkskins” (2020)], admitted that working on “Monolith” was a challenge for her. “It ended up feeling almost like theater,” said the actress, and her words accurately reflect Vesely’s film style. It is essentially a one-woman show, with Sullivan never leaving the screen (other characters exist only as voices of the podcaster’s interviewees). Sullivan had to carry the entire film on her shoulders, and she did so impressively, earning the Best Actress award from the judges at the British FrightFest 2023. This festival showcases films on the border of horror, thriller, and science fiction, and “Monolith” is a blend of these genres, though it leans closest to a thriller.

Unfortunately, Sullivan’s performance is one of the few strengths of Vesely’s film. While the first half is engaging and intriguing, the second half becomes increasingly disappointing, culminating in a finale that reveals the creators’ lack of ideas for a coherent resolution. What starts as a film with a promising premise quickly devolves into a parade of worn-out clichés familiar from cinema and television [comparisons to Bruce McDonald’s “Pontypool” (2008) and “The Twilight Zone” come to mind]. Campbell and Vesely attempt to give the film deeper meaning, but do so clumsily, and when they touch on themes of class privilege, unresolved trauma, and journalistic ethics, it comes off as false, like a ploy to justify the weak plot. As a result, the film, which likely aimed to criticize the worst traits of modern journalism (sensationalism, superficiality, bias, amateurism), falls victim to them itself.