Review by Stephen Tronicek
COLOSSAL is funny, terrifying and meaningful and unlike many high concept films, it actually earns all of those through more than superficial comedic lines and intense action on screen. It is a film about people, and about how people can use their own problems to warp them into monsters. It’s also a monster movie, and kind of a comedy and if that sounds like a lot for a movie to deal with, you’d be right. Does that stop Colossal from being something of a minor miracle? No.
Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is a wreck. She has been kicked out by her boyfriend, she’s back at home, she’s dealing with alcoholism and trying to befriend old hometown friends like Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). She just needs to get her life together. Sounds easy…until Gloria realizes that every single time she steps into a playground she manifests as a giant monster in Seoul, South Korea, that copies her every move.
There’s a whole lot going on tonally in Colossal, but its secret weapon is its use of genre mirrors the way that the characters progress and grow. The start of the film plays like something of an insufferable hipster comedy, with Gloria throwing out meaningless references to Wes Anderson, and trying overall find meaning in her life at the bottom of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. It is insufferable but it’s also necessary because this part of the movie is best described as a facade. At the start of the film, it might be in the characters interest to hide their true feelings behind the guise of a goofy facade, but by the end that just isn’t the case. Not spoiling anything, COLOSSAL gets genuinely scary before it ever gets truly funny, and the way that writer/director Nacho Vigalondo balances these tones, by juxtaposing each with the character development, takes COLOSSAL from just high concept creativity to something approaching a scathing takedown of self-pitying people using their problems as an excuse to do horrible things.
The incorporation of the theme into the plot progression easily irons out most of the tonal inconsistencies, though the film does sometimes misstep along the way. This could be kind of expected because of just how many different tones are being accessed throughout the film, but when it does misstep, the audience feels it as the tonal dissonance crashes down.
Thankfully, that only happens when the story takes bigger shifts, which eventually due to the aforementioned pairing of plot and character, are each justified by the end of the film. By the end of this crazy ride, there’s no doubt that what you’ll see is special. COLOSSAL is a colossal entertainment.
