Can you name another director whose most recent film, released eight years ago, was nominated for Best Picture, won four Oscars including Best Actor, earned over $900 million worldwide, and yet led to the filmmaker being effectively pushed out of Hollywood soon after?
There’s only one Bryan Singer, an anomalous filmmaker who has been plagued by multiple accusations thrown at him over the last few decades, denying all of them and proclaiming them to be “outrageous, vicious, and completely false.”
A reckoning of sorts came to Singer in 2018, right in the thick of #MeToo, slowly but surely brewing over his rumored past. It felt like it was just around the corner and ready to explode into the zeitgeist. In fact, many were just waiting for the bomb to drop after word came out of his erratic behavior on the set of the Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It finally did. He hasn’t directed a film since.
Or, at least we thought.
Around two years ago, Singer, who now lives in Israel and was working without an agent, was meeting with would-be investors about backing a passion project of his, which at the time was supposed to be made for under $10M. He somehow mounted the funding needed and made a film about a father-son relationship set during a Middle East conflict.
Turns out, not only did Singer shoot this secret film in Greece back in late 2023, starring Jon Voight, but it’s actually been playing in limited theaters — with barely any promo to its name — since last Friday. Don’t believe me? Here’s the trailer.
The film, titled “Monument,” is set in the Middle East in 1999, during Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. It tackles an architect named Yacov Rechter (Voight) who is hired to design a memorial for fallen soldiers. His son, played by Joe Mazzello, however, pushes for something different — a monument that honors all victims of the conflict, not just one side.
There are currently three reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes, all positive, but I wouldn’t have known this film had already come out if it weren’t for a reader having emailed me about it.
Singer has basically gone back to his indie roots. People tend to forget that beyond the blockbuster bombast of ‘X-Men,’ ‘Superman’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ he also made “The Usual Suspects” and “Apt Pupil.”
Curiously, the film has no actual U.S. distributor — it’s being independently released by its production company, Bad Hat Harry Productions.
Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning director of "The Artist" and a Cannes competition regular, has just wrapped production on his latest film, "The Third Hand."