Chaos intensifies in Alejandro Landes’s deeply mad thriller about a wild cult of teenage bandits who have rituals, guns and a hostage – but no Kurtz
This overpoweringly tense and deeply mad thriller from Colombian film-maker Alejandro Landes is the best thing I have seen at
Berlin this year: something between Apocalypse Now, Lord of the Flies and Embrace of the Serpent. It depicts a dysfunctional society and guilt-ridden family in miniature, and demonstrates the shifting power dynamics of a cult, the craziness embedded in the minds of child soldiers, the resentments nursed in a military unit without a supervising commanding officer, and the very real danger of eating shrooms grown in cowshit.
The Monos are a unit of teenage guerrilla bandits, operating in a country very similar to Colombia or Bolivia — and apparently named after the Mono Grande, the mythical giant monkey for centuries rumoured to exist somewhere in South America. They are initially shown in their up-country mountainous retreat where they have little to do but hang out, await orders on the radio, look after a cow that has been given to them for milk (good for their young bones and teeth) and see to their
American hostage, an engineer who is being held captive separately from her small child. They are permitted and even encouraged to develop sexual relationships among themselves, and have developed weird rituals and traditions. When one of them has a birthday, there is a version of the bumps, except it’s sexualised thrashing with a belt. Everyone joins in and their hostage is also sportingly allowed a go.