It’s primarily a sensory experience. Monos follows a team of teenaged guerilla soldiers somewhere in South America, but we’re told nothing about them. Instead, we’re embedded with them—we watch them squabble and laugh and wrestle in the dirt; we see them try to keep warm at night, and then fire off their rifles in the morning, maybe to prove to themselves they’re still alive. We never learn anything more about these kids—they’re called the “Monos,” which translates to “monkeys”—although over the course of the movie, their individual personalities begin to shine through. Unlike in Lord of the Flies, we never witness their break from society. The Monos are wild from the start.
The movie, directed by Colombian-Ecuadorian filmmaker Alejandro Landes, is split in two halves. The first takes place on top of a cloud-shrouded mountain, amid abandoned structures of concrete and rebar. It’s a gorgeous, forbidding place, and most of the film’s pleasures come from the lustrous scenery paired with the minimal power of composer Mica Levi’s score. The second half of Monos is a descent into the jungle, a claustrophobically verdant maze of mud, leaves, and rivers swollen with rain. By now the team has begun to fray apart, although their mission and their individual desires are never fully articulated.
That lack of specificity ultimate hurts the movie. The hypnotic first half simply doesn’t give the audience enough to latch onto, and the abstraction of the plot doesn’t propel one’s interest toward the finish line. There is a story, sure—much of it is focused around an American woman (Julianne Nicholson) the kids are holding prisoner. The woman’s dynamic with her captors is fascinating, at times maternal and other times utterly hostile. But she ultimately feels like something imported from a more conventional, more genre-focused movie.
There’s much to be awed at in Monos. Scene by scene, it’s positively scintillating, and the performances are very good (special shout-out to former Disney Channel standby Moisés Arias as one of the team’s more bloodthirsty members). But the plot points never accumulate, and the story fails to build to anything profound. Instead, like its subjects, Monos gets lost in the jungle.