Podcaster Lily Sullivan from Evil Dead Rise gets fixated with mysterious black bricks - could it be aliens? - in this lo-fi thriller, but it is more intriguing than wholly satisfying.
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00:00 Lily Sullivan from Evil Dead Rise is podcasting Paranoia, an Australian thriller monolith.
00:05 Sullivan plays the unnamed interviewer, a disgraced journalist who has moved into
00:09 investigative podcasting who becomes obsessed with a story about mysterious bricks showing
00:14 up in people's lives. It's effectively a one-woman show for Sullivan as the only
00:18 actor that physically appears on screen, all the rest of the cast are only heard in voiceover,
00:24 which means the movie does often feel like a podcast or a radio play, but luckily Sullivan
00:30 is so compelling that she makes the film watchable. It is a slow burn, but like the
00:34 central character, I gradually found myself being drawn into the mystery of the bricks.
00:39 The film uses its minimalism to build up this kind of eerie atmosphere, but it takes an allegorical
00:45 turn in the final third, focusing on self-identity and guilt. Sullivan's character has very dubious
00:50 journalistic ethics, and that means that Monolith is both more and less than the
00:55 sum of its bricks in a way that I found ultimately somewhat underwhelming.