On a faraway mountaintop, eight kids with guns watch over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow.
Perhaps the best way to describe the film is to keep it simple: Monos is a mood, an aesthetic, an idea; a sensory cinematic experience more than a story.
Read Jake's full article... https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-monos-a-hypnagogic-mix-of-teen-angst-and-warfare
A bleak allegorical study of war as seen through the eyes of children
The idea comes from, in many ways, the country where I'm from, Colombia, a country that's experienced 60 years of civil war. And it's been going on for so long, and there are so many different factions and sides, and there's peace agreements and they break, so, in a way, it wasn't something you could go at with clear ideological premises, but instead something that had a kind of ghostly feel. That's what inspired the story, to try to break any binary notion of future/past, man/woman, paradise/hell, and try to get _at something that you feel through the stomach or through the skin. I think that's what cinema has; it appeals to your conscious, like a story does,...
Monos is a film that's both raw, and abstract. Incredibly well done and surprisingly well acted by the young cast. An interesting look at those who are essentially nothing more than pawns of a game they don't even understand, but I liked it a lot that the focus is not on it but on this group of young people and the experience is as crude and strange as it is mesmerizing.
Now were not given too much of a preamble here, suffice to say that we arrive at an hilltop bunker where eight lads ranging from late teens to only just lost their baby teeth are holding two hostages. One is an American doctor (Julianne Nicholson) and the other is a milk cow. Amidst all their guns, machetes and grenades these men know that its the beast that will explode loudest of it isnt milked regularly and so they are ordered by their diminutive leader, the Messenger (Wilson Salazar) to take extra special care of it. Thing is, though, theyve some booze and high spirits to help alleviate their boredom, and so after some careless gunfire they find themselves devoid of one of their charges, and also without their leader and principal calmi...
