Colossal (2016)

(In French, On TV, April 2022) Years after placing Colossal in my Netflix queue, I finally saw it… dubbed in French, off a DVR late-night recording interspaced with ads. Not the ideal circumstances, not the best timing, but sometimes a DVR-based workflow is easier than streaming marginal choices, especially on a less-than-impressive Internet connection. Still, a good movie should remain identifiable no matter the viewing situation, right? Well, I think so – and if Colossal isn’t necessarily a great movie, it’s quirky and fun enough to be worth a look in less-than-ideal conditions. Anne Hathaway stars as a bit of a loser – a young woman with big dreams of becoming a writer, but whose drinking problems get her kicked out of her job, relationship, apartment and New York City itself. Going back to the empty family house of her childhood town, she gets to rebuild everything… with the help of a past flame (Jason Sudeikis).   So far, so small-town romantic comedy, right? We’ve seen endless Hallmark movies with roughly the same premise. But none of them has ever done anything close to what Colossal does next, which is to take a flying leap into surreal fantasy as our protagonist realizes that stepping on a playground at a specific time of the day will create a gigantic monster in Seoul duplicating her gestures. It gets even wilder when another person (for reasons badly explained in a flashback) also enters the playground and manifests himself in Seoul. Fully exploring the possibilities of its premise, Colossal also delivers a better-than-average romantic drama talking about women encountering terrible men, flipping the usual small-town romance into something far darker. There are few tidy answers here: no real steady progress from addiction to recovery, and little comfort to be gained from romantic clichés. Yet it goes big in its imaginative conceits. The blend of dull realism with wild surrealism is remarkable enough – and it will keep you glued to the screen, wondering what’s going to happen next and how far writer-director Nacho Vigalondo will push things. I don’t quite like the way the film wraps up, but that’s not a big deal, considering what it can deliver on its way there. Colossal may still be in your own Netflix queue, but if that’s the case, don’t worry: even six years later, there hasn’t been anything quite like it.