‘Monster’ movie review: A film’s endurance test with a distorted portrayal of LGBTQIA+ issues

When some mainstream filmmakers and screenwriters suddenly start talking about “a topic that hasn’t been talked about much in our cinema,” that often means a film that touches on LGBTQIA+ issues. So now the person is filled with the feeling of being afraid of his past. A record of negative portrayals of these communities. Any hope of them correcting past mistakes is often lost, as proves again Demon.

But the discussion on this will have to wait. Only a viewer who can manage to sit through the film’s unbearable first hour can reach the parts where the screenwriter tries to be progressive. This first hour is an extended slot set aside for Lucky Singh (Mohanlal) to regale the audience with his Punjabi lines (a mish mash of “Balle Balle” and “Soni Kudi”) and loads of humour, which is often played by One excuse is cross double entrance.

Singh, who runs a chain of restaurants in Punjab, has landed in Kochi to close a land deal. He becomes a headache for Bhamini (Honey Rose), a cab driver assigned to pick him up from the airport, as he insists on carrying her around all day. He also breaks into her house, where she is set to celebrate her first wedding anniversary with her husband Chandran (Sudev Nair). But, as most would have already guessed from the pattern seen in quite a few movies in recent years, there is more to Lucky Singh than meets the eye.

Filmmaker Vaishakh and screenwriter Udayakrishna, who had earlier gifted Mohanlal one of the biggest hits of his career. pulimurugan (which had its share of issues), re-team Demon, where they try their hand at the thriller genre with a progressive twist. At the risk of revealing plot spoilers, it has to be said that the portrayal of LGBTQIA+ characters in the film does not help normalize them in mainstream cinema, but rather helps stigmatize them further.

According to the screenwriter’s theory, society’s attitude and mistreatment of homosexuals could turn them into hardened criminals, who would later commit a series of crimes with vengeance. In a key scene, where a gay couple is confronted by a police officer, they proceed to kiss each other in front of him, in an effort to emphasize their sexual identity. Such sequences give an idea of ​​a distorted understanding that the makers have about these communities. Clearly, there hasn’t been much research into writing these parts, which were probably included because “progressive topics” have a market these days.

Laziness is written throughout the script, with most of the thriller portion involving Lucky Singh narrating the entire sequence of events to a group of police officers who were unaware of what was going on, as they had not seen the previous Udayakrishna Prasad. was. aartu, Even the title of the film seems to be a random choice, which is evident from the final scene, where it tries to explain, as a thought. It takes some monstrous levels of willpower to endure this test of patience.