Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.
The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.
Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.
The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.
There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.
Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.