The fantasy of “Colossal,” Nacho Vigalondo’s new genre mashup, starring Anne Hathaway, does two things well at the same time: it embodies a strong idea and it delivers aesthetic pleasure. At its best, it achieves a rare synthesis of virtues that is a primal value of the cinema: it revels in the power of cinematic artifice to tell a story that confronts big questions about real life.
“Colossal” reaches that level only intermittently, but it’s rare for any filmmaker to achieve it at all; it’s also a conceptual achievement that makes its very description a pack of spoilers (which I’ll try to avoid nonetheless), because the element of symbolic synthesis doesn’t occur until fairly late in the film, as a dramatic revelation. This structure, while making for a wondrous twist, also renders more or less everything that leads up to that revelation mere exposition, and worse—a careful puzzle-plotting to bring about the specific and peculiar conditions by which the grand twist of fantasy gets a context in which it makes sense. Which is to say that “Colossal” is a nearly bad movie until it becomes a nearly great one; its drama is constrained and governed by the rules of its fantasy, which at times are haphazard and vague. Even the performances reflect the movie’s contours—Hathaway’s performance is merely lively and vigorous until, upon the florid outburst of fantasy, it turns whimsical, unrestrained, agonized, seemingly self-transformative.
With fair warning and my own promise of caution, here goes: “Colossal” fuses the intimate romantic-comedic drama of self-discovery with monster movies—specifically, with the Japanese kaiju genre of gigantic quasi-reptilians inaugurated by “Godzilla.” Hathaway plays Gloria, a New York-based online journalist who, at the start of the action, has been unemployed for a year. She lives with her boyfriend, Tim (Dan Stevens), or, rather, lives in his apartment, and when he becomes exasperated with her hard-partying habits (friends come over during the day to party with her while he’s at work) and her heavy drinking (she turns up in the morning after a night out and can’t recall where she’s been) he packs her bags for her and throws her out.
With nothing to do and nowhere to go, she heads back to her rustic home town (the fictitious town of Mainland) and to her late parents’ now empty house there. No sooner does she arrive in Mainland than a pickup truck pulls alongside her; it’s driven by her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who has never left town, and whom she hasn’t seen since she left, about fifteen years ago. He runs a bar that he inherited from his late father; hearing that she’s at loose ends, he offers her a part-time job as a waitress, which she happily accepts. Having no other personal ties to the town, her life now revolves around the bar, which Oscar has shorn of the country-and-Western-themed décor that his father had created. But there’s one vintage unrenovated room in the back, about which Gloria exclaims, “It’s like a fucking Wes Anderson movie in here. I love it,” and she makes its refurbishment her project.
She also spends lots of time with Oscar, who is gently courting her with generous services—for instance, he has a stash of inherited furniture, and he sends over truckloads of stuff to furnish her house. She also spends lots of time after hours hanging around the bar with him and his two best friends, the gnarled and cynical Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and the quiet, earnest Joel (Austin Stowell); her friendship with Oscar is steady but romance doesn’t bloom.
Then there’s big news: a giant reptilian monster (which made a brief appearance in Seoul, shown in a tag scene at the start of the film, a quarter-century ago) is back, wreaking havoc in Seoul again. The beast shows up at 8:05 each night in a lightning-streaked cloud of mist and vanishes back into it after a few minutes of fury. It’s the news sensation of the world, the subject of obsession on television and online. Gloria watches video of it, too—and, suspecting that there’s a connection between her and the monster, puts her theory to the test, recruiting Oscar, Garth, and Joel to help her.
That test is an exhilarating moment of pure cinematic invention, which Vigalondo films with a straightforward practical exuberance and a logical cleverness. The connection is discovered, and it propels the film into a subgenre that’s both familiar and difficult to pull off: that of tiny causes bringing vast effects. (Think of Bob Dylan’s implicit cameo in “Inside Llewyn Davis” or the connection in “Hidden Figures” between the bravest celestial adventures and the calculations of a woman with a pencil.) Again, staying just at the edge of spoilers, the connection between Gloria and the gargantuan parallels the connection between Gloria and Oscar; the ups and downs of their relationship—dating back to childhood—are reflected in the appearance and behavior of the monster and, for that matter, in the monster’s own conflicts in the monster realm. The story at the core of “Colossal” is one of a relationship that was monstrous in childhood and that, despite appearances, remains monstrous in adulthood. It’s a story of trauma—of a gender-centered trauma involving the physical force exerted by males (of any age) against females—and of that trauma’s enduring power in the life of a woman who hasn’t acknowledged it, faced it, and worked through it.
Vigalondo’s a better fantasist than he is a realist, a more imaginative wizard of metaphors than an observer of social life. He doesn’t unfold depths of personal history or inner experience in behavior, but he does sketch the tensions between Gloria and Oscar with a few touches that are themselves metaphorically potent (foremost, the furniture). He makes much of Sudeikis’s brightly lit bonhomie in evoking the shift from devotion to possessiveness, from desire to violence. He gets an extraordinarily wide-ranging, deep-burrowing performance from Hathaway (who’s also one of the film’s executive producers). As the action moves from a romantic comedy to the darkening shadows of drama (and does so with a deft symbolic turn), Hathaway’s presence rises to a haunted, horror-struck fury. That’s because the horrors at the root of “Colossal” aren’t those of Godzilla and Mothra but of Elliot Rodger and other male mass murderers with sexual grievances.
The gravity of the ugly passions at work in the relationships in “Colossal” doesn’t prevent Vigalondo from delighting in the oddball byways of the utterly unrealistic monster fantasy that arises from it. He downplays the story of terrorized Seoul, but, even as he keeps the gore off-camera, he fulfills the fundamental premise of cinematic deaths—they’re not viscerally repugnant but morally repugnant. Metaphors, if they’re any good, distill complexity not into simplicity but into clarity, bypassing the details of particular situations to find and represent their unifying universal traits and ideas. Comedy can help to confront unbearably painful events while subjecting ugly actions and attitudes that pass for normal to well-deserved derision. That’s the theory, which is so obvious as to make it surprising that the seemingly bottomless pit of fantasy movies and C.G.I. spectacles, for all the sensory delights that they may deliver, is in general so sludgy and vague in ideas, and so diffuse or so bland in symbolic significance, compared to the modest yet harrowing—and loftily, furiously comedic—ravages of “Colossal.”
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