There is so much beauty behind a filmmaker’s motivated use of character, space and visual aesthetic as it relates to a specific subject matter. When you are nurtured into an emotional experience of the film, everything is just a building block towards a much bigger picture. It’s bigger than you; it’s bigger than the characters and almost always bigger than the film itself. When intention meets film, what you get is a mirror into truth and agency.

Directed by Anthony Mandler, Monster follows Steve, a 17-year-old film student who finds himself in a battle for his innocence after unknowingly being implicated in a robbery/murder. The central idea of this film is very familiar – something we have seen explored in various films. However, what makes it so thought – provoking is the deliberateness of the decisions that were made throughout the entire film.

From the use of voice-over as an expression of how his creative voice as a film student is slowly becoming an interrogative one, to the use of a theatre performance atmosphere to convey a life story being performed. It is so clear how this not only translates to his positionality as a film student but to the whole idea of performing one’s identity based on your experiences.

There are various scenes that stand out in this film. A lot more fascinating to me are the scenes where this theatre performance atmosphere comes into play. At the beginning of one of the scenes, the door slides open to reveal Steve’s father, when he is visiting him in prison, much like the curtains opening at the beginning of a scene in the theatre – a symbol that this is his scene, drawing us into him as a father and his interpretation of the situation. Your focus is supposed to stay with him and never shift.

In the same scene, Steve asks “You believe me, right?”- after having established such a strong bond between this father and his son, the deliberate decision to not have him immediately responding with affirmation is so precise. That silence is such an important symbol. He definitely believes him but he knows it is not up to him. This also plays into the theatre performance symbolism where at the end of a play, the audience is invited to ‘believe’ the performance. What we have here is a film that manipulates visual and sonic aesthetics so well that it allows the viewer to transcend time and space.

In filmmaking, precision is very gratifying. When you watch a film and almost every aspect of its conveyance is motivated, this reels you into the story in a very unique way. Creative processes are becoming more and more intentional when it comes to filmmaking, perhaps because we are living in a time in which there are various cultural shifts in how people think, feel and speak about specific subject matters, and this is worth a study.

When intention meets film, everything from how a performance is blocked, the decision to track into the action at a specific point, the pace, the use of voice over, etc. is the driving force of story and meaning. This makes storytelling very compelling because you are not just following the characters but you are also being taken into a very calculated and symbolic expression of a lived experience. Certain scenes/shots/lines of dialogue propel you to actively take on a moral, political or social stance on the subject matter at hand. When such intentional decisions are made, the film becomes more than just an account of a story but a mirror for the viewer.