This second fiction feature from Colombian-Ecuadorian writer-director Alejandro Landes is a dizzying fable of child soldiery that plunges its audience headfirst into an immersive world of war and adolescence. Brilliantly played by a youthful ensemble cast, and accompanied by a breathtaking Mica Levi score, it is alternately sensuous and scary, thrilling and appalling, with a dark heart of horror at its core.
We open on a remote mountaintop, where a ragtag band of teenagers plays blindfolded football. These are the titular Monos (alluding to the Greek word for “alone”) – a guerrilla outfit overseen by a fearsome “Messenger”, who teaches them that “we work for the Organisation; the Organisation is our family!” They have cartoonish noms de guerre (Rambo, Dog, Wolf, Boom Boom) and lead a regimented life amid a landscape of surreal stone structures, as mysterious as the monolith from 2001. Their primary task is guarding “Doctora”, an American prisoner who is apparently being held for ransom. But the kids are more excited by the prospect of a new arrival: a (sacrificial) cow named Shakira, which they are told is on loan from a benefactor and must be milked and cared for or it will explode.
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