[yasr_overall_rating]
When her insurance company refuses to approve the care her husband needs to survive, Sonia Bonet (Jan Raluy) takes things into her own hands. Up against an unyielding bureaucracy and disinterested workers, she is pushed to her breaking point: with her son in tow, she attempts to fight the system.
Though it sounds like a horror film, “A Monster with a Thousand Heads” doesn’t deal with Kaiju creatures slamming into each other with multiple craniums. Instead, its thrills come from the searing, heartbreaking sight of a woman driven to the edge of sanity by the System – in this case, the bureaucracy of the Mexican healthcare system. Rodrigo Plá’s small-but-explosive dramatic thriller, running at a succinct 70 minutes (sans end credits), plays almost like a chamber piece, a struggle of One against an Army that is both claustrophobic in its intensity and epic in its thematic scope. Yes, the plot may not be all that novel (look at it as a better “John Q”) – or plausible for that matter – but the fierce central performance and the director’s confident control of pacing make you overlook the film’s inherently cliched/somewhat-preposterous set-up. The claws this “Monster” bares happen to be much sharper than any of the ones in Guillermo del Toro’s Kaiju throwback “Pacific Rim.”
The film opens with an unbroken, two-and-a-half-minute shot that initially brings to mind the “Paranormal Activities”’ gimmicky, static sequences…and proceeds to wipe the floor with them. While the horror anthology’s shots were designed for the sole purpose of creating an extended build-up to a shock that rarely came, “Monster”’s opening is filled with so much quiet drama unfolding on screen, the camera becomes a passive observer, immersing us into a tragedy that could hit us all at any moment. Sonia (Jana Raluy) wakes up to find her husband Guillermo collapsing on the floor. Her family comes down, sleepy, reality slowly settling in. She calls the ambulance, asking them to hurry. Simple and devastatingly real.
From that moment on, cinematographer Odei Zabaleta spends a good portion of the film focused on Sonia’s facial expressions, as she grows from victim-in-denial to savage avenger. The ambulance nurse informs her that the situation is only going to get worse. She refuses to accept it, “It will get better when he resumes treatment. We’re just waiting for the approval.” The approval never comes – in fact, Sonia can’t even get to see her doctor, met with blatant indifference at the clinic after waiting for hours. When Dr. Villalba (played by Hugo Albores) literally attempts to sneak by, Sonia snaps.
Bringing her son Dario (Sebastián Aguirre Boëda) along for the ride, Sonia follows the doctor to his home. She greatly inconveniences him by interrupting his upcoming squash session, and next thing they know, Sonia has a gun pulled on him and his wife. “Not all applications are approved. That’s how insurance companies work,” Dr. Villalba says in panic. As it turns out, only “the board” can reevaluate Sonia’s application…And so it keeps going, the determined Sonia climbing up the echelons of the healthcare “net” and doing whatever it takes to get to the “main guy,” who may or may not solve her issue – or it may even be besides the point. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it.
The sequence leading up to the title credit – which has the balls to arrive at the 10-minute mark in this short film, mind you – is worthy of the price of admission alone. We know what Sonia is holding in her hands, we know why she’s torn and what’s coming; an intense electronic wail builds up, mirroring/foreshadowing “Monster”’s upcoming accumulation of momentum – and then it cuts off harshly. Another scene involving Maria speaking into a security camera inaudibly – but conveying every word with her desperate face – is a standout. A fired shot, followed by a resounding, prolonged silence, perfectly arrives at a crucial, edge-of-your-seat moment. There are even tidbits of hilarity, such as a naked man barging in on a female water-exercise routine. Alas, those moments of wit are purposefully brief. The world in this film consists of harsh, dimly-lit-halogen, geometrical environments with no soft corners, warm colors or kind people.
The filmmakers employ an ingenious technique of juxtaposing the witnesses’ current testimonies in court, via voice-over, against what actually unfolded. It’s best exemplified in an early sequence of Dr. Villalba disregarding Sonia, as the witness narration blankly states, “I told [the doctor] she had been waiting for him for hours.” Another great example occurs during a rather shocking moment of Sonia inadvertently shooting someone in the leg, with the witness’s narration pointing out the suspect in court.
Jana Raluy dominates the screen. From the initial voice message she leaves when trying to reach her doctor, to her trying to maintain some traces of dignity while escorting naked men out of a steam room, the actress displays enormous range and a sense of urgency vital to this film’s pace. She bares it all on screen, similarly to what Charlize Theron did in “Monster” (another character forced to resort to violence by the society that birthed her), but without all the make-up. When her son smacks the bejesus out of a character with a baseball bat, Raluy’s torn expression is a sight to behold.
Sure, some events seem a little forced and hard-to-buy, some characters are overtly demonized and, like I mentioned, a certain amount of disbelief has to be suspended to buy into the notion of a single person laying down the law in a cold, emotionless world. However, if you overlook those flaws, you will discover a superlative, step-by-step examination of what it would be like to be in that situation, taken to the extreme to emphasize its grueling point, without over-sentimentalizing it. “Monster” can also be interpreted as a subtle feminist allegory: a resilient, resourceful woman fighting the society that keeps shunning her. (“Did you order the erotic massage?” one of the male board members asks another, when Maria barges in on them, naked in a sauna. “She knows you only last a minute.”) The title itself lends itself to questions: who’s the monster in this film? The bureaucratic culture, or the borderline-demented human that it spawned?
The filmmaking team keep surprising us with unexpected camera angles, sudden cuts and heart-wrenching moments of unbearable suspense. Best of all, Rodrigo Plá’s “A Monster with a Thousand Heads” represents an important shift in Mexican filmmaking, reminding us of its elegance, subtlety and power, and hopefully signaling more to come. Guillermo del Toro, a fellow Mexican, should take note when he’s making his next monster bash.
Opens at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas June 17th
