I vaguely remember watching “Monster” at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, “vaguely” being the key word here. I could have sworn it played under a different title … that is until I searched through my archives and found a tweet I wrote about the movie dated January 23, 2018 — lo and behold, it was in fact called “Monster”!
In that tweet I wrote: “Want to know how mediocre Sundance 2018 has been thus far? The first standing ovation this year at the Eccles goes to director Anthony Mandler's conventional, but watchable courtroom drama MONSTER #Sundance2018.”
Okay, so I found it “watchable.” I shrugged it off as another cliched courtroom drama filled with some more of that racially-fueled injustice. From what I can recount, there didn’t seem to be anything fresh or innovative about it. The film stars Kelvin Harrison Jr. and a pre-“Tenet” John David Washington, who has a small role here, and the director is Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose debut “Monsters and Men” showed real promise just a year prior.
The film’s three-year delay is a whole other topic altogether. Entertainment Studios first acquired the film back in April 2019, with Netflix then stepping in and picking it up in November 2020. Three years is a long time, reviews have so far been mixed and dumping it into the endless rabbit hole that is the Netflix catalogue will no doubt render it more obsolete.