Promoted under the banner of Black Lives Matter by Netflix, Anthony Mandler’s directorial debut follows in the footsteps of recent courtroom dramas including Steve McQueen’s Mangrove and Ava DuVernay’s mini-series When They See Us, productions which document with often heart-breaking precision the inequalities and prejudices faced by Black individuals when confronted by systems of law and (primarily white) authority figures.
The film tells the story of Steve Harmon (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a young Black man from a respectable middle-class family, whose dreams of attending film school are dashed when he is put on trial, accused of being complicit in, if not directly responsible for, a robbery which resulted in the brutal murder of a convenience store clerk.
Narrating events through voiceover as if it were a screenplay he himself is writing, Harmon recites the circumstances which lead to him becoming friendly with the actual perpetrators of the crime, ASAP Rocky’s charismatic but rough-around-the-edges James King, as well as the main instigator ‘Bobo’, played by an underused John David Washington (Tenet, Malcolm and Marie). Despite their association, Steve appears to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and like so many young men, is rounded up as a ‘usual suspect’.
Labelled a ‘monster’ by the state’s prosecutor, Harmon finds himself sat in a monotonous grey courtroom surrounded by lawyers and members of the jury dressed up in similarly monochrome outfits – a stylistic choice which adds to the film’s overall tone of hyperrealism, a slight dreamlike gloss permeating through every scene – waiting nervously as the lies of ‘witnesses’, lawyers and others standing accused begin to stack up against him and his version of the truth.
Central to Monster’s core message is this idea of truth and its inevitable mediation or outright distortion. From the deliberately retro VHS filters and effects that Harmon applies on to his phone’s HD footage, to the competing layers of reality and storytelling that play out in the courtroom that is to decide his fate, Monster‘s thesis is that one individual’s perception of the truth may differ from another’s, and due to the inherent impossibility of absolute fact, it is up to the individual – be it accused defendant or budding filmmaker – to tell their story and theirs alone.
For Harmon as a storyteller, this means flashing back and forth, a non-linear parade of events which layers memory on top of memory in parallel with the unfolding court case. Its a formal device which works in part, but given the film’s eventual denouement and its occasional turns toward melodrama, arguably weakens its overall effect. Strangely, despite being released in 2021 on the aforementioned streaming giant, Mandler’s film has been on the shelf since 2018. If Monster had been released then, I feel like it would have packed more of a punch, but its self-aware meta-commentary upon the nature of the filmmaking and storytelling only heightens a sense of artifice that something like Mangrove masterfully sidesteps. Nonetheless, if there’s one success to highlight, it is truly Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s central performance, marking the actor as one to watch from here on out.
Notes from the Multiplex 