On a faraway mountaintop, eight teenaged guerillas with guns watch over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow. Playing games and initiating cult-like rituals, the children run amok in the jungle and disaster strikes when the hostage tries to escape.
Monos is a difficult film to describe. A film that combines the themes of Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now, the narrative direction of the story is not so easy to determine. It simply follows a team of teen soldiers as their sense of self-preservation sends them on a spiralling descent into anarchy as the structure of the group crumbles.
Stationed in the mountains of Colombia, living in dilapidated monolithic structures, eight teens are trained as part of 'The Organization'. What The Organization's role is, is unknown; all motivations are unclear. Beyond being tasked with monitoring a hostage, objectives for this teen team codenamed 'Monos' are also not divulged to the audience. We are simply watching a largely isolated group of teens during an unknown war, left to their own devices.
It is this responsibility that they have been given, that proves to be the catalyst of their own destruction. These are hormonally charged teenagers, that are more inclined to seek out attention from the opposite sex, fight for power of the group, binge-drink alcohol, take hallucinogenics, or otherwise party hard. All aspects that reek of a lack of discipline and control; all of the pieces needed to cause the breaking down of the hierarchy.
One night of debauchery was all the catalyst that was needed to set the crew on their path. The characters have already been stripped of their names; Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Smurf (Deiby Rueda), Wolf (Julián Giraldo), Boom-Boom (Sneider Castro), Dog (Paul Cubides), Bigfoot (Moises Arías), and Lady (Karen Quintero). If you thought that people become monsters on the internet when they get that vague notion of anonymity, the situation is so much worse in this scenario. Societal expectations are disregarded in this world without parental control, and as the film progresses, you can feel their humanity fraying at the seams.
The cinematography and score work together exceptionally well, with some gorgeously vivid natural imagery in the rainforests. The resplendent landscapes combine really well with the minimalist musical score from Mica Levi, switching between some extreme evocative close-up shots of the Monos members painted with mud, and the more tranquil, water-tussled forestry.
From a slow, observational film in the first act, it accelerates in speed and aggression as the discipline and control of the Monos degrades further and further until it reaches the climax, leaving many arcs hanging there unfinished. An interesting look at child soldiers; how did they get in that predicament? what makes them stay? and even if they could escape, what would happen then?