In 2007 Nacho Vigalondo brought to Fantastic Fest the paragon of time travel films, Timecrimes. It remains to date my favorite time travel movie, demonstrating closed-loop time travel in perfect detail that I have never been able to break. Since then, his feature films have included Extraterrestrial, a love story set against the backdrop of an alien invasion and the suspense thriller Open Windows, both of which have paved the way for something much… bigger. I can't promise not to get spoilery, because I really want to gush about this one.
Just as Timecrimes is my paragon of time-travel, I will hold Colossal as my favorite kaiju film of all time (I'm really sorry Guillermo del Toro. Pacific Rim was fun, but I am so in love with this movie I would let it take me under the bleachers). Conjured up from Nacho's twisted and wonderful imagination is a story hides a massive amount of depth and texture behind a simple premise.
He begins by turning a few ideas on their heads. As the film opens, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is being dumped by her boyfriend Tim (Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens), after returning from one of her nightly benders. How many hundreds of movies begin with the same thing happening to a male lead? So we find Gloria returning to her small home town after washing out in big New York City, moving back into her parents' vacant house and immediately heading to the town's only bar to drown her sorrows. There she meets her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) reminisces about old times, and accepts his offer to let her work at the bar before drinking herself stupid and passing out in a playground on the way home.
So far, we've got the beginnings of a pretty standard mumblecore flick that brings to mind something like Drinking Buddies, but here is where that similarity ends. When she arrives home Gloria learns that Seoul has been attacked by a gigantic monster. Buildings destroyed, people killed, the whole world has gone into a panic. This of course is good a reason as any for another night of binge drinking and sleeping in the park.
So how does small-town America become the backdrop for a kaiju story? It takes a couple of days for Gloria to realize the monster is somehow mimicking every move she makes when she wakes up in the playground. That revelation and the resulting interplay between Gloria, Oscar, and their friends form the bulk of a larger-than-life romp that metaphorically touches on issues of jealousy, fragility of the male ego, struggle for dominance in a relationship, the pain of cutting your losses and the self-empowerment one can gain through making the decision to do so.
In Colossal, Vigalondo turns everything on its head from the female lead to the location of his kaiju story to having Jason Sudeikis playing a giant dick. It's all done so naturally, with such a great mix of laughter and tears, and the conclusion is so satisfying I can't imagine anything that I would change. Colossal is its own weird and wonderful beast, the perfect mumblecore kaiju fallen-out-of-love story.
Augustus Gloop
