Monochrome is a 2018 thriller about a disillusioned young woman who becomes a serial killer, and a brilliant detective must use his unusual neurological condition to track her down.
The female serial killer is itself a rare thing, but that doesn’t mean the movies haven’t taken to giving them their fair share of screen time. From Sharon Stone to Charlize Theron, there’s been plenty of memorable women killers in entertainment, the genre a kind of fascination for most. With writer/director Thomas Lawes‘ latest Monochrome, we get a new predator and also a new hunter in a film that has some genuinely good ideas but just misses the mark.
Emma Rose (Jo Woodcock) arrives home to find her home being raided by police and her boyfriend in cuffs, getting stuffed into a car. Probably not much of a surprise though since he’s behind a massive pension hustle that’s ruined a lot of lives. In panic, she escapes the city and ends up sleeping on a park bench where she’s awakened by an argument between two men, one quite a bit older than the other. When the younger man drives off in a huff, she follows the older man and, noticing he is wealthy, pleads for him to give her food and shelter, offering cleaning and housekeeper services for free. The man is Roger Daniels (James Cosmo), a renowned artist who takes to verbally abusing the girl, treating her with little worth. She decides to take deadly action, which brings in a new branch of police with investigator Gabriel Lenard (Cosmo Jarvis), diagnosed with synesthesia, taking to finding a killer on a new kick, murdering those who take her in.
Perhaps no other genre in television or movies have taken to people with unusual abilities or anomalies than crime thrillers. Dozens of programs have featured agents and detectives with all kinds of superior powers of deduction primed by something out of the ordinary. From super geniuses to math phenoms to psychics and more, those who catch bad guys on the small and big screen are often very unusual. So it is with Monochrome, which features a man whose senses are all crossed up, meaning when he looks at a painting, he hears music, if he sees numbers they show colors, and so on. It’s not all that uncommon and naturally has a number of varieties, but for Gabriel, it proves invaluable in tracking down his suspect.
Even as a full length feature film, Monochrome feels much more like a pilot for a television series, from its slow pacing and production quality to its generic score and mostly tame violence. Gabriel is perfect TV detective fodder, even if his condition seems to imbibe him with what comes across as superhuman, the screen loaded with colorful graphics to show off his ‘view’ of the world and his uncanny skill in drawing conclusions from seemingly inane features. That cupboard over the counter slightly off kilter? Definitely a fight for life caused it.
Jarvis, who most will recognize for his singing career, is well cast, his bald head and square jaw giving him a great look for the part. He’s got terrific presence and even if the role is rife with convention, he makes it his own. The problem is that the film simply can’t get out from under its premise, with Emma going from one awful wealthy person to the next (which I suppose is meant to be a bit of commentary) and set off by the simplest things, but it’s all too much since we barely get to know any of the people she kills, aside from her first. Worse, the film has both Emma and Gabriel narrating bits of their perspective, which is performed with lifeless delivery and ultimately entirely unnecessary.
I’m really on the fence here as the film has some clever ideas, though Lawes is the best thing going for it, his strong direction really the star here. He cuts and moves his camera with great urgency and loads every scene with a sharp attention to detail that keeps us well-informed, sure, but more importantly compelled to see more. It’s too bad that the film overall can’t deliver the same impact.
Monochrome releases June 6 on VOD and DVD.