Kill the Monsters kills
05 Feb 2020.

photo is by Sam Gaetz

Kill the Monsters is a new gay movie from Breaking Glass Pictures, the distribution company who send out screeners with a gigantic “Property of breaking glass pictures for screening purposes only” watermark that takes up the bottom third of the left side of the frame, making it difficult for reviewers to watch the goddam thing. But watch it I did, because Kill the Monsters is an unusual and compelling film.

Shot in wide screen black and white, it concerns three men - Sutton, Frankie, and Patrick (played by the film’s writer/director/editor Ryan Lonergan) - living in a threeway in New York. Sutton and Patrick were a couple, bored with each other, when they decided to pick up the cute young Frankie in a park. Patrick mothers him, while Sutton feels his role is to get Frankie high. They also fuck a lot, in various configurations. When Frankie gets deathly ill they decide to drive (!) across America and move to Santa Monica. The film is divided into chapters, each one a significant date in the country’s history, like 1778, the whole thing scored with lush orchestral music, usually interrupted with abrupt edits.

Along the way they spend an evening playing cards with some eurotrash lesbians, although one of them supposedly represents Trump. It’s mostly a comic scene, and it is fun (The guys throw down a hand consisting of three queens).  Meanwhile, Frankie’s illness tears them all apart. The actor playing Frankie, Jack Ball, is fantastic. He spits out a fierce monologue while sitting in a bathtub that is the very definition of “Oscar clip."
According to the press release, the film is “a comedic political allegory” and that we are “watching the history of the United States unfold within the course of one feature length film.” Lonergan states that he was inspired by how Animal Farm examined communism through allegory. Much of this is lost on me, but applying it cost none of the entertainment value. 

Kill the Monsters is a pretty good movie, but the style is challenging, even for a film snob like myself. Enjoy it or not, it is clear that Kill the Monsters is unique and extraordinary. It deserves our attention, and I wish more gay movies were as epic in scope and ambition.