Scary Monster, Super Creeps

Colossal (2017) is a different kind of movie - it's not really a drama or a comedy, although it has a lot of both. It isn't a monster movie or a horror film, except kind of. The closest thing I can think of is Get Out (but that isn't very close either).

It stars Anne Hathaway as a drunk party girl in New York. She comes home one morning drunk and her British boyfriend (Dan Stevens) throws her out. The next scene finds her in some suburb, getting out of a taxi with a few boxes and going into her parent's house. They are away somewhere unspecified, and the whole place is empty and unfurnished.

When she's walking back from a store with an air mattress, she runs into an grade school friend, Jason Sudeikis, who gives her a ride to the bar he inherited from his father. Sudeikis seems pretty different from the New York crowd she used to hang with - he's a beard and flannel shirt type. But his bar is kind of a cozy little dump, so she has a few beers with him and his friends, and stumbles home in the morning to pass out on the floor.

She wakes up to a phone call from a friend about a disaster in Korea. A giant monster appeared in Seoul, stomped around crushing buildings and people and disappeared. To skip ahead a bit, Hathaway finally realizes that the monster appears when she drunkenly stumbles through a particular playground at a particular time. The monster is her.

Later, a giant robot appears as well, and -SPOILER- it is Sudeikis.

The odd thing about this is how it plays out - it is kind of like a dark comedy, except it isn't at all funny. It is kind of a horror movie, but everyone is numb from booze, and it is all happening so far away. Maybe it's a surrealist drama?

In fact, maybe it's just a plain addiction drama with a single substitution. Say that Hathaway had discovered that she had driven home drunk and killed someone. Same exact story, but normal, banal even. So they just took a common story and turned it a little sideways. They do this in a couple of ways. For example, you know those rom-coms where the girl has to return to her small town from the big city, and falls in love with the simple, honest, pickup-driving guy from her past? Yeah, not here. Sudeikis is a genuine small-town loser and creep. Maybe that's why this movie isn't funny - it's an anti-rom-com.