Alejandro Landes Echavarría
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The touchstones are numerous — Lord Of The Flies , Apocalypse Now , Intacto , Aguirre, The Wrath Of God ; there is even something of the immediate intimacy of Larry Clark’s Kids in the teen-make out scenes — but Landes wears his referencing lightly on his sleeve.
Animal instincts abound during various moments in the film, suggesting the darkness of Apocalypse Now when combined with Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), another ode to youthful banality flavored by promiscuity and evil.
The film suggests Larry Clark's alternately hectoring and leering Kids (1995) as cast with bloodthirsty, horned-up child soldiers.
Lord of the Flies, Apocalypse Now, and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are touchstones on the path of Landes’ astonishing and utterly immersive movie, but Monos casts its own wholly unique spell.
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God have both been widely cited in critical responses to Monos , while Landes has noted that he and co-writer Alexis Dos Santos watched Elem Klimov’s traumatising child’s-eye view of war, Come and See , while collaborating on the script.
Visually Landes via brilliant casting and the evocative cinematography of Jasper Wolf, immerses the viewer in a hallucinatory narrative with shades of “Apocalypse Now” or “Come and See.”
Alejandro Landes’ mesmerising, gorgeous and intriguing tale of child soldiers holding an American doctor captive in an unnamed South American country feels like the bastard child of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God and Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, with clear and deliberate references to Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now – among others – thrown in for good measure.