![]() ![]() A dextrous score by Bear McCreary helps negotiate the alarming tonal shifts, but in the end it’s Hathaway who holds it all together, even as her on-screen life falls apart.A fireworks party with live music runs till 11 at Hotel Congress. Meanwhile, in the US playground sequences, cinematographer Eric Kress keeps Hathaway in the foreground, wittily magnifying her size to mirror the spectacle in Seoul. Hats off too to Sudeikis, who slips almost imperceptibly from apparently harmless man-child (“You wanna hang out?”) to embittered, controlling bully – two sides of the same self-loathing coin.Īmid the increasingly dark, character-driven comedy, Vigalondo is at pains not to shortchange the supernatural elements, conjuring sparse but effective creature-feature visuals that combine the playful fantasy of Ghostbusters with the “found footage” grit of Cloverfield, all on a reported budget of only $15m. Hathaway does a great job of making emotional sense of the film’s warring elements, her teased fringe and teen-goth wardrobe suggesting an arrested adolescence to which she brings genuine pathos. ‘Genuine pathos’: Anne Hathaway in Colossal. Elsewhere, it is pointedly observed that “if it only attacks Seoul, people will stop caring”. There are satirical swipes, too, at the spectator culture of rolling news when Gloria worries about “all those innocent victims” on the other side of the world, Oscar replies that it makes you realise “how lucky we are to be watching”. Crucially, the monster “never looks down”, apparently oblivious to the carnage it leaves in its wake. But a barnstorming performance by Anne Hathaway has opened it up to a wider audience, albeit one that may be utterly baffled by a movie in which the real monster turns out to be a bottle.įrom Tim’s early declarations that “you’re a mess – you’re out of control!” to the guilty awakenings that plague Gloria (“What did I do? How many people did I kill?”), Vigalondo’s script maintains a sharp balance between the down-to-earth disasters of her drinking and the out-of-this-world chaos playing on the TV news. ![]() Colossal began life as a Spanish-language script that Vigalondo had originally intended to shoot as a cheap experimental Euro-pic. Having first made his mark with the Oscar-nominated short 7.35 de la Mañana, writer/director Vigalondo scored cult hits with his first two features: the looping, low-budget weirdie Timecrimes (2007) and Extraterrestrial (2011), a dysfunctional romcom with UFOs that earned him the title “the Woody Allen of science fiction”. Is she a delusional paranoiac? Or are her personal problems being played out in super-size fashion, with catastrophic results? After much nervous head-scratching, Gloria concludes that she is somehow controlling this beast. One morning, as Gloria shambles home through a lonely children’s playground, a gigantic “kaiju” materialises in Seoul, wreaking havoc. ![]() But against the odds, Vigalondo keeps us invested in this tragicomic parable about the destructiveness of addiction, the hangover of remorse and the horrors of domestic abuse. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and there are many moments when Colossal threatens to collapse like the buildings crushed beneath the gigantic monster feet. Lashing together disparate tropes from quirky US indie-romances and old-school Japanese monster movies (think Rachel Getting Married v Godzilla), the uneven yet fitfully funny result plays like a Noah Baumbach remake of the rehab dramedy 28 Days crossed with Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim. ![]() Here, Bayona’s countryman Nacho Vigalondo serves up an impressively bizarre genre hybrid in which a young American woman’s drunken binges manifest themselves as a monstrous, lizard-like creature that terrorises South Korea. In last year’s fantasy masterpiece A Monster Calls, the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona gave us a young British boy wrestling with grief and anxiety, metaphorically realised in the form of a gigantic walking tree. ![]()
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