Colossal

It's rare to find a movie that so defiantly refuses to be put into a genre box. Is this a drama? A black comedy? A pointed exploration of alcoholism? A buddy adventure? A giant monster movie? The answer is that it's all of these things, often at the same time. And this offbeat tone makes it seriously riveting, anchored by wonderfully unshowy performances by Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis.

It opens in Manhattan, as Gloria (Hathaway) returns from yet another drunken night out. And her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) has finally had enough. He throws her out, so she returns to her childhood hometown, where she runs into old classmate Oscar (Sudeikis), another drunk who now owns the local bar and offers her a job there working with Garth and Joel (Tim Blake Nelson and Austin Stowell). Then she starts noticing that her inebriated behaviour seems to be controlling a huge monster that's currently attacking Seoul, Korea. And when she gets Oscar, Garth and Joel to help her test this theory, things really begin to get strange.

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Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo takes such an original approach that it's impossible to predict anything that might happen next. The plot unfolds in ways that feel eerily organic, generating proper tension along the way, plus plenty of brittle humour and darker emotion. Hathaway plays Gloria very cleverly as a hot mess who's always the life of the party but knows she needs to get herself back on some sort of a track. So noticing the bigger effect of her actions jolts her into action. Sudeikis' Oscar is a bit less self-aware, heading to his own rather shocking meltdown. And because the side characters all have lives of their own, there are properly engaging developments for Stevens, Nelson and Stowell to play with as well.

Put together, this is a clever exploration of the impact our behaviour has on the people around us and the word at large. And it's also a heart-stopping look at the nature of destructive relationships. The monster-movie metaphor may seem a little over-the-top, but it's so cleverly woven into the fabric of this film that it can't help but catch our imagination. Sometimes, Vigalondo seems to have more ideas than he can possibly work into a scene, while other segments feel like they stretch a clever idea to the breaking point. In other words, not everything about this works, but it's hard to remember seeing a movie that was so adept at both entertaining and challenging us.