By Jake Wilson
MONSTER SUMMER ★★
(PG) 98 minutes, in cinemas
A lightweight horror-fantasy aimed in theory at young teens, Monster Summer could be described as a cut-price Stranger Things – and it certainly is strange in a number of ways. The most obvious one is that the characters are stuck in a time warp: while the nominal setting is the mid-1990s, the film’s heart belongs to the 1970s above all.
Mason Thames, Noah Cottrell, Julian Lerner and Abby James Witherspoon in Monster Summer.Credit: Icon
Noah (Mason Thames), the young hero, is a budding investigative reporter who composes his drafts on a typewriter and pores over a paperback copy of All The President’s Men. “I feel like Gene Hackman in The French Connection,” says one of his friends, a sentence I can’t imagine being uttered by anyone my age in the actual ’90s when I grew up.
A still more crucial ’70s reference point is Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the source for both the Martha’s Vineyard setting and the theme of a whistleblower whose warnings are ignored. In this case, the monster threatening the community isn’t a shark but something more nebulous: Noah calls it a “witch”, but it’s an open question what that really means, especially given the film’s commitment to using the minimum of special effects.
What’s evident is that some unknown force is abducting children – more specifically, adolescent boys – and releasing them soon after in a state of near-catatonia. On the human level, Noah is naturally concerned for the victims, but as a newshound with a nose for the lurid, he senses the story could be his big break.
In some respects, the director David Henrie is a diligent Spielberg pupil: he’s picked up on his master’s way of telling the story with the camera, often pivoting or tracking backward so that a significant object moves into the foreground (an abandoned bike, for instance, letting us know that its owner is in trouble).
Oddly, he’s less good with actors, despite being best-known as an actor himself (he played the young Ronald Reagan in a recent biopic aimed at the conservative market). In fairness, he can’t entirely be blamed for failing to get anything fresh out of the immovable object that is Mel Gibson, who dominates proceedings as an ex-cop named Gene who becomes Noah’s reluctant mentor.
Gene is the exact kind of role Gibson likes to play at this end of his career: a grouchy recluse who remains a good guy at heart (as we know from the crucifix that dangles from the rear-view mirror of his Volkswagen). While sceptical about the existence of witches, he knows that monsters are real – like the monster on a motorbike who long ago abducted his five-year-old son.
As if the emotional monologue where Gene recounts this trauma wasn’t enough, we also get a scene where he hallucinates his lost little boy tearfully accusing him: “Why’d you let him take me, daddy? Why’d you let the monsters get me?” It’s all remarkably harrowing for a film meant for all the family, especially as this subplot gets little in the way of closure.
True, many of the family films made by Spielberg and his 1980s disciples have their share of creepy elements, sometimes intentional and sometimes not. The difference here is that Henrie and his writers seem bent on ripping away the veil of metaphor, so that what remains is less a fairytale than a straightforward story about abuse.
Viewed in this light, Monster Summer isn’t far from the lurid 2023 child-abduction thriller The Sound of Freedom (which Gibson executive produced). That in turn suggests it’s more up-to-date than it appears, not least in its sympathy for paranoid thinking. But this is not a form of modernity I can bring myself to recommend.
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