So if a movie isn’t what you expect it to be, does that make it a bad film?

In the run-up to tonight’s screening of MONSTERS, I’d heard comparisons to DISTRICT 9 and 28 DAYS LATER. Well gang, allow me to dispel the hype…MONSTERS is nothing like either one of those two films. Now there are moments within the film that play like allusions to JAWS and APOCALYPSE NOW, however they are just that – moments.

MONSTERS is a story about a world where alien life has crash landed in Mexico, and as such nearly half the country including the stretch that backs onto the American border has been quarantined and declared The Infected Zone.

South of the Infected Zone, we meet Kaulder and Sam. Kaulder is a photojournalist, and Sam is his publisher’s daughter. He has been tasked with ensuring her safe return home to America…a route that must take them around the infected zone…lest they be forced to cut through it.

The film isn’t so much a fight for survival against these monsters, so much as it is a pilgrimage through the land they have ravaged. There are a few unsettling and disquieting moments, but no real action and very few scares. The film plays less like DISTRICT 9 and much more like THE ROAD.

None of these details are bad qualities…they’re just very unexpected. The movie is less interested in showing the viciousness of these creatures than it is showing the haunting qualities of their destructive wake. Sam and Kaulder don’t seem all that afraid during their close encounters, but they sure are shook up when they walk through vigils or happen upon dead bodies.

MONSTERS does a great job of making its audience feel unsettled, but doesn’t seem to be interested in actually scaring the audience. Likewise, the story does finish so much as it just stops being told. I can’t really call MONSTERS a bad film, because there were a lot of scattered details about it that I liked. I can however say that I hoped it would be more than it ended up being.

MONSTERS plays TIFF once more – Sunday at 3pm. It will be available on demand on September 24th, and in limited theatres on October 29th.