What is Monument? A fever dream? A thought experiment? An apprenticeship as endurance test or rather an exercise in cruelty?
Sure to be one of the more ambigous international premieres at the upcoming Rotterdam Film Festival, Monument follows a group of students performing various tasks as hotel interns, but the mundane decor gradually gives way to spine-tingling menace.
The teaser, much like the film itself, is cryptic but perfectly captures the offkilter atmosphere that Jagoda Szelc already tapped into with her peculiar debut, Tower. A Bright Day. While her first film, a Berlinale (2018) world premiere, mixed a sense of foreboding with domestic drama before veering into downright uncanny territory, Monument could connect with a broader audience insofar as it embraces genre thrills more overtly.
Prepare for a thorough psychological freakout in a film that's richly symbolic and keep a close eye on Szelc and the actors of Monument, all of them graduate students of the Lodz Film School.