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.
