Monolith

After a controversy derails her career, a disgraced journalist isolates as she begins a new job, a much less respectable one, but her only real option. Alone and still angry, she stumbles onto a strange conspiracy, but when the trail leads uncomfortably close to home, she's forced to confront not only herself, but the lies that lay both at the heart of the conspiracy, and her own family’s story too.

An effective one-woman show, Monolith is a lo-fi sci-fi thriller, telling a story of privilege, pandemics, the perils of going Viral, the Memefication of society, and the ways that paranoid disinformation can spread like a pathogen.

It’s a story about “Brain Rot” basically.

Lily Sullivan is pretty impressive here, as she is basically on her own, playing an unnamed journalist who has become a pariah in the industry, and on the internet, after a scandal of some kind ended with her having been fired. This scandal could be the result of well-deserved karma, or maybe just drummed-up nonsense, with some vague references to her possible failure to verify something, or that perhaps she used deliberately false information, or maybe she got outmaneuvered by a bad actor. We don’t know. Either way, she made a mistake after she took on some public figure and she lost. Now, she’s ridiculed and discredited in the press, and is getting a lot of hate mail, so she has retreated to the secluded safety of her parents’ fancy home, a place that would otherwise be standing empty, as her parents are on vacation somewhere outside of the country.

Because of all of this, we understand that, at the very least, she is now seen as unethical and untrustworthy by the rest of the world, so she is not only desperate for some kind of vindication, but she wants everyone to be forced to see it too.

So, while she’s definitely not happy about the fact that her only job option is some dumb podcast that focuses on conspiracy theories and mysteries, basically the dirt-lot flea market of investigative journalism, she sits down and starts hunting for a story to feature on the show. While wading through the deluge of quackery that now fills her work in-box, she finds an anonymous email with only a name, the words “the brick,” and a phone number, with the subject heading of: “The Truth Will Out!”

This is the beginning of a journey that will send her tumbling down a weird rabbit hole of a story about people who have mysteriously “received” strange bricks, that are said to be “the size of a gold bar” but a deep, deep black, which seem to have an some kind of indescribable supernatural power. These bricks bring about terrifying visions filled with guilt and regret and an overwhelming sense of dread, and the people who have them seem to believe that the bricks were specifically meant for them, with the question of… who made them? Why? The strange story unspools, and the strings she chases only get weirder, and more disturbing, and soon enough… threatening.

Then she “receives” one of these strange black bricks herself.

After that, she is finally forced to face some hard truths. Truths about herself, truths about her family, and truths about the sins upon which they have built their life.

She is finally forced to face herself.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but the story touchs on a lot of very relevant social topics. It’s a little undercooked at times, some of the connections are a bit tenuous, but still, the intent is pretty clear, not to mention pretty effectively threaded within a very tense and creepy bottle episode of a sci-fi film, one that somehow finds a way to make podcasting seem cinematic… for the most part. Sure, the way they do it is akin to the way that hacking was often shown to be “exciting” in films in the early 90s, but still… it works.

I liked it.

All in all, Monolith has the same feel of stumbling across a weird TikTok about something strange and creepy, like when a person finds hidden rooms in their house, or maybe just something about The Mandela Effect, the kind of things you find late at night while scrolling. And much like those Tiktoks, Monolith is vaguely scary, pretty creepy, and kinda weird, and sure, maybe it doesn’t amount to all that much in the end, but still… warts and all, it’s a pretty fun and tense good time..

Thumbs up.