Film Review: Colossal

The marketing for Colossal pitches it as a quirky rom-com with a twist. Anne Hathaway stars as Gloria, a somewhat lost, unemployed, recently-dumped alcoholic who moves back to her humble hometown to regroup. There, she reconnects with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudekis), and the scene seems set for some mumblecore romance – but there’s a complication.
After Gloria passes out drunk in a playground, she wakes up to the news that a Godzilla-esque monster appeared across the world in Seoul, destroying much of the city. Gloria continues to get black-out drunk in the park, the monster attacks keep happening – until Gloria realises that she is the monster. Somehow, her local playground is a stand-in for Seoul. If she steps towards the slide, she stomps on a skyscraper. If she drunkenly falls by the merry-go-round, she crushes and kills hundreds of people.
But the real twist isn’t that Gloria’s a magical monster. The twist is that the people in her life are beginning to demonstrate a far more insidious form of beastliness.
Writer and director Nacho Vigalondo’s screenplay is razor-sharp, working on several levels. Gloria’s alcoholism comes under fire, as the terrorised Seoul shows how seemingly ‘personal’ problems have huge ripple effects. But Vigalondo’s awareness of rom-com tropes and his slow subversion of them also subtly builds into a damning critique of toxic masculinity and ‘The Nice Guy’, showing us how often we romanticise dangerous behaviour.  
Hathaway is fantastic, playing a more well-meaning self-destructor than in Rachel Getting Married, while Sudekis’ arc is all the more painful for his low-key charm. Vigalondo evokes the bland genericism of small-town life while capturing the sometimes playful, sometimes terrifying scenes in Seoul. Homages are paid to Japanese tokusatsu cinema and kaiju monster films, but by lambasting gender expectations and Hollywood tropes, the director has created a wholly original beast all his own.