The Monitor

Unnerving Scandinavian psychological thriller
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"The Monitor"
(Lionsgate, 2012)
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NOTE: mild spoilers below
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The pace and tone of Scandinavian horror films is quite unlike their American counterparts - witness the oddly haunting vampire art film, "Let The Right One In" - and they have a tendency to be more rooted in the real, mundane world in a way that makes them just a little bit more realistic and a whole lot creepier. "The Monitor," like "Let The Right One In," takes place in a large, drab, anonymous modern apartment complex, the new home of a woman on the run from her abusive former husband. She's pathologically worried about her son, who the father had abused, and is terrified of everyday life. Nonetheless, she accidentally befriends an equally tremulous man, a salesperson at a local electronics store who becomes her ally in a psychological melodrama that involves menacing...

I did not see it coming
Noomi Rapace is obssesed with protecting her son from the hallucinations caused by her mental disorder. Hallucinations that extend to everything around her. In order to protect her son, she goes to an electronics store and buys a baby monitor from the lonely Kristoffer Joner. Rapace often listens through the baby monitor to a boy being mistreated in the building where she lives, a boy that was killed long ago. In the meantime, Rapace's son befriends a boy, but who this friend is we only find out through the help of Joner, who gets caught up in Rapace's world of paranoia.

Paranoia, loneliness and murder are intertwined in this slow pace but suspenseful and bleak norwegian film full of unexpected twists and full of figuring out on our behalf. If you would like to wacth Noomi Rapace in another great performance, I recommend you "Beyond" (Svinalängorna).

Once again, Noomi Rapace shines and surprises...
***************** CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!! *********************

I just watched "Babycall" (The Monitor) with Noomi Rapace and it was wonderful. For a horror movie (though I'd rather call it a thriller), it had more suspense and psychological intrigue with a storyline built to allow for inference by the audience and not like our (terrible) American horror movies (with a few rare exceptions) that are built on gore, blood, grotesque sequences of violence, with little to no storyline or one that is severely lacking in depth, originality, and development, and sometimes with too much CGI usage too. This film is blunt in it's subject matter. In other words, instead of alluding to, with great emphasis, the subject matter of child abuse, the depictions of child abuse at its most severe is graphic, and nothing is left to the imagination. There isn't a lot of cinematography used to try to highten the suspense, shock, and horror of the violence portrayed. The images are clear and feel...

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