‘Monolith’ Review: Gloomy Australian Podcast Thriller Muffles Its Message
Amy Nicholson There’s a good movie to be made about podcasts that traffic in unsolved mysteries where hosts rank cliffhangers and that hiccuping dramatic cadence over journalism. For half of its running time, the Australian thriller “Monolith” seems like it might be that movie. But the film, a debut feature from director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell, falls sway to the clickbait tropes it intends to send up: red herrings, a tone of suffocating gloom and a desperation to keep the audience on the hook. The sole actor on screen is Lily Sullivan, playing an unnamed Interviewer and audio ne’er do well who has recently fallen into disgrace over a j’accuse gone wrong. (Her inbox is bricked up with outraged emails.) Doxxed out of her home, she sets up a recording studio in her parents’ modernist mansion — the type with eerie floor-to-ceiling windows and so much nothingness outside that she may as well be hiding out on Mars. Her folks are abroad, but her flock is online, if she can come up with a hit show that will once again shower her in five-star ratings.