Colossal

Colossal (2016)
Voltage Pictures / Route One Entertainment / Union Investment Partners / Sayaka Producciones / Brightlight Pictures
Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Reminder: This blog contains plot spoilers, possibly in the main body as well as in the plot summary section. Read on at your own risk!

This film debuted in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It didn’t win any awards, but it was picked up for cinema release in the United States, which eventuated in April 2017. It was distributed by Neon – not the streaming service owned by Sky and based in New Zealand, the other Neon – which has successfully distributed several Cannes Palme d'Or winners in the years since, but which was then only three months old. Colossal was, in fact, the very first film they distributed. I don’t think it was marketed very well, although the fault may be ignorance on my part. The fact that Toho sued over early press around the film that compared it by name with Godzilla probably had some bearing on its subsequent low media profile. It tanked at the box office, but to judge by online reviews and comments among the kaiju fan community, it’s generally well thought of.

One night in Seoul, South Korea, a girl and her mother search for a doll she dropped in the park earlier that day. Just as she finds it, a gigantic creature manifests a couple of blocks away and walks through the city.

25 years later...

In New York, Gloria returns to her boyfriend Tim’s flat after a drunken all-nighter. Gloria is an unsuccessful writer and alcoholic. Tim breaks up with her and, having already packed her bags, tells her to move out. As he leaves for work, her friends arrive and attempt to continue their party in the flat.

Gloria takes a taxi to her childhood home in Mainhead, a small town in New Hampshire, which her parents have been renting out. (At least, that’s what she claims. The electricity is still on and the place is clean, but it’s almost completely unfurnished, suggesting any tenants have conveniently just moved out. The parents are obviously living somewhere else – we don’t see them or learn any more about them.) By chance she meets Oscar, who used to be her friend in elementary school and now runs the bar he inherited from his late father. Oscar takes her to the bar, where she spends the rest of the day. After hours, Oscar and Gloria continue to drink with Oscar’s friends Joel and Garth. Gloria flirts with Joel; when Joel attempts to kiss her, Oscar reacts aggressively, but the moment passes. It’s morning when Gloria finally heads home, while the local children walk to school. Gloria’s path takes her across a playground.

The news that day is dominated by reports of a huge creature that appeared in Seoul, walked through the city and disappeared again, leaving hundreds dead. (The creature, a little taller than the residential buildings around it, has long limbs with stumpy feet, a tail, no discernible neck and a tall head that terminates in a pair of horns.) The regulars in Oscar’s bar watch the rolling news coverage all evening. Gloria falls asleep on her way home on a bench in the playground; she’s woken up by the schoolchildren passing by the next morning.

Oscar starts bringing Gloria gifts of furniture. She accepts his offer of a job at the bar. He tells her that the monster appeared in Seoul again, although this time it caused less damage. By now it’s been established that both manifestations happened at precisely 8.05am, New Hampshire time (which would be around 10.05pm in Seoul), and are related to a similar incident 25 years earlier that had been dismissed as a hoax. Gloria notices that the creature scratches its head absent-mindedly in the same way she does, and that its movements in general appear to be a mime of her own. By standing in the playground at 8.05am and raising her arms, then checking the subsequent news reports, she confirms that she is somehow responsible for the creature’s activity.

She demonstrates this to Oscar, Garth and Joel after another all-nighter at the bar, standing in the playground and dancing while they watch live footage online of the monster dancing in Seoul. When military helicopters fire missiles at the monster, Gloria feels the impacts herself, and her reaction causes the monster to swat one of the helicopters which promptly crashes into its head. She falls and passes out, waking up later at home. Oscar has pocketed her keys and lets himself in with fresh groceries. He shows her the latest news from Seoul, the focus of which is not on the destruction she caused but on a giant bipedal robot that materialised behind the monster – this is apparently his own avatar. (It has the sculpted, rounded look of a Transformer, with one large lens for a face and metal vanes swept back from its head.) Oscar seems excited about this new development, but Gloria is overwhelmed with remorse for the deaths she’s caused while drunk. She obtains a Korean translation of the apology she wants to make and inscribes it into the ground the next day, to the astonishment of the international media.

Gloria goes home with Joel that night. She wakes up the next morning and sees on the news that Oscar is terrorising the people of Seoul. He and Garth, both still drunk, are at the playground. Gloria confronts them and slaps Oscar; the footage of the giant monster slapping the giant robot is repeated endlessly on TV that day and becomes an Internet meme sensation. That night, after hours at the bar, Oscar becomes aggressive and manipulative, driving Garth away and trying to coerce Gloria back into drinking by threatening to act out in the playground again. The argument ends with the two openly fighting at the playground the next morning while Joel meekly watches. Oscar insists that Gloria will continue to work at his bar or he’ll start deliberately trampling residential areas in Seoul. Later in the day, he sends Joel to Gloria’s house with another vanload of furniture to apologise on his behalf. Gloria walks round to confront Oscar at his own house, where he appears contrite.

Tim unexpectedly arrives in Mainhead – Gloria suspects he’s come to check up on her and criticise her situation after she left his emails unanswered, although he claims to have a business meeting in the area. He drives her to her shift at the bar, where Oscar makes a show of ordering her around and postures aggressively for Tim’s benefit. This culminates in him setting off a barrel of fireworks in the middle of the bar to assert his control over Gloria. Tim admits that he has no meeting and came to take Gloria away with him, but he leaves empty-handed. Gloria returns home in the small hours of the morning to find Oscar has let himself into her house. He sits in her lounge, drinking beer, and frankly admits his intention to intimidate her out of phoning Tim.

Gloria now recalls in full the childhood incident that set the present series of events in motion. She and Oscar were on their way to school holding homemade dioramas of cities – hers was of Seoul. A gust of wind blew her diorama into the grove of trees that has since been replaced with the playground. Oscar went to retrieve it, but through the trees she saw him trample her diorama out of jealousy. From a sudden freak storm, lightning struck them both on the head, at the spot that Gloria habitually scratches. Falling, they dropped the toys they were also carrying, which their colossal avatars now resemble.

Gloria tells Oscar his behaviour stems from his own sense that his life hasn’t amounted to anything. She makes a show of phoning Tim and agreeing to return to New York with him. She and Oscar fight through her house, destroying much of the gifted furniture, then race each other to the playground as 8.05am approaches. Here Oscar savagely beats Gloria and deliberately stamps across the playground, presumably causing death and destruction across Seoul, telling her that he will do this every day if she leaves him. Nonetheless, Gloria goes to the airport later that day – but not to leave with Tim. Her flight lands in Seoul before the sirens go off to warn of another imminent monster attack. Sure enough, Oscar, who has spent the day drinking, steps into the playground and his robot alter ego appears in Seoul. But Gloria has correctly guessed that the effect that links the two locations works both ways, and by standing in the appropriate spot in central Seoul, she is able to make her avatar appear in Mainhead. Judging the Gloria-monster’s movements from the Oscar-robot’s reactions, she remotely picks Oscar up and throws him away.

The remarkable thing about Colossal is that it takes the principle that giant cinematic monsters aren’t just there for their own sake but symbolise something – a principle frequently overlooked in American monster movies and embraced in Japanese kaiju eiga – to a personal extreme. The gigantic creature and robot that terrorise Seoul don’t represent existential real-world threats or some significant recent event, but the faults of the individual characters. For what I think might even be the first time, the skyscraper-sized forces of destruction are external manifestations of destructive behaviour on the human, personal level – Gloria’s alcoholism and Oscar’s control freakery.

The difference between the two is that Gloria is essentially self-destructive, at least up until the point when she discovers she’s also responsible for hundreds of South Korean deaths. I get the impression that she was content enough with her life in New York, and even potentially in Mainhead – it’s only when she realises she’s harming other people after all that she’s driven to go sober and take responsibility for her actions.

Oscar, by contrast, thrives by controlling, possessing and harming others. He’s clearly delighted to learn that he has the power of life and death over the people of Seoul – it’s something that not only gives him more power directly over other people but gives him another means to control Gloria less directly, by playing on her guilt and by threatening to go on the rampage if she doesn’t do what he wants. The relationship between Oscar and Gloria is transparently meant to put us in mind of more conventional abusive relationships – the stalking, the gifts, the insinuations, ultimately the coercion and the violence. Gloria is fortunate enough that a never explained supernatural force has granted her the power to confront Oscar and bring home the consequences of his behaviour.

This wouldn’t be the first overtly feminist monster movie, although I can’t think of very many others. (The Heisei era Godzilla and Gamera films are pretty good on female representation, but that’s not quite the same thing.) There’s Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) – a straightforward revenge fantasy which also centres on an alcoholic woman and a manipulative, abusive man – and its 1993 remake – in which Daryl Hannah literally grows as a person by asserting herself. Colossal belongs to the era of the “NotAllMen” hashtag and meme, which started to take off on social media in 2013. This was a way of satirising men who get all defensive, sometimes in bad faith and sometimes obliviously, in response to women’s complaints about institutional misogyny. The foundational example was a tweet in which the female writer complained about how men habitually interrupt her and was interrupted by an anonymised man who asserted that not all men do that. Colossal also makes something of a point out of the notion that Oscar’s behaviour isn’t anomalous.

Oscar is clearly a model of toxic male behaviour. But Gloria’s ex-boyfriend Tim doesn’t come out of this too well either – having dumped Gloria for pretty good reasons, instead of moving on he continues to police her behaviour and attempts to reinsert himself into her life when it suits him to do so. His standoff with Oscar in the bar presents us with two controlling men in parallel, offering more of a comparison than a contrast. Joel doesn’t fare too badly, appearing as an attractive and slightly naïve alternative romantic interest for Gloria, but in the final analysis he’s subordinate to Oscar, quietly enabling him from the sidelines. The best of the men in this story, as far as I can judge, is probably Garth, who disappears from the film after Oscar actively forces him out of the bar with insults.

The plot has its problems. It’s too fantastically convenient that Gloria’s old home, which she says her parents have been renting out (apparently at a distance, since they’re nowhere to be seen), should have been completely vacated just in time for her to move back in. Assuming that that’s true, of course – but if not, who’s been keeping the old place spotlessly clean? It’s not clear where Gloria finds the money for a plane ticket to South Korea – surely Oscar isn’t paying her that much for her bar work? The ending requires a bit of a leap of faith from the viewer, but is explicable – the earlier scene with the helicopter shows us that there’s some sensory connection between Gloria and her avatar. But how does she pinpoint the right spot? And how much of Mainhead and its surroundings has her giant creature demolished? Mind you, these are the sorts of convenience that films and TV programmes tend to be riddled with, so perhaps we shouldn’t take too much exception to them.

The cast is small but fairly stellar for a giant monster movie. Character actor Tim Blake Nelson as Garth is probably the least surprising of the big names. Anne Hathaway was a huge catch for this film – she was reportedly drawn to the script for artistic reasons, having reached a point in her career where she could afford to pick and choose. She’d recently been Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Les Misérables (2012) and starred in Interstellar (2014), all significant cinematic performances. Her leading roles go as far back as her debut on film in The Princess Diaries (2001) and on American TV in Get Real (1999-2000). Jason Sudeikis, meanwhile, plays against type as the abusive Oscar – he’s better known for his comedy roles. He did a stint as a Saturday Night Live writer and regular, won some supporting film roles then got his film breakthrough starring in Horrible Bosses (2011) and its 2014 sequel. He’s probably best known internationally for co-creating and starring in the sports-themed feelgood comedy/drama Ted Lasso (2020-23), which is a world away from his performance here.