#jun jong soe

[cantsayidont]

MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON (2021): This heady, disjointed supernatural drama-thriller is I guess Ana Lily Amirpour's take on the YA modern fantasy genre: A previously near-catatonic young woman called Mona Lisa Lee (Jun Jong-Seo), imprisoned for 12 years in a New Orleans asylum, escapes after discovering that she has the power to psychically control the minds of others. Lost in a world she barely understands, Mona falls in with a hard-bitten stripper named Bonnie (Kate Hudson), who immediately realizes she can use Mona's power for scamming and petty crime, and befriends Bonnie's 10-year-old metalhead son Charlie (Evan Whitten) while being pursued by a cop named Harold (Craig Robinson), who knows what Mona can do because she previously forced him to shoot himself in the leg.

Less deliberately sketchy than Amirpour's previous features (characters even have names most of the time!), MONA LISA is still awfully thin on plot, relying more on mood, atmosphere, and the protagonist's longing to be somewhere other than she's been; its vivid strangeness is kind of compelling, although at points the lack of direction leaves it feeling threadbare.

Of the central characters, Charlie is well-drawn, a latchkey kid who's had to develop his own strategies for giving himself the emotional regulation his mother doesn't provide, but Mona's idiot savant blankness is sometimes uncomfortable (although Jun does as well as she can with a difficult part), and the story is meaner about Bonnie than I think was really called for. Even more than in the 2016 THE BAD BATCH, I was uneasy with the film's treatment of its Black characters — none of them are killed this time, but most get battered and humiliated for comic relief — which is starting to seem like a problem for Amirpour. CONTAINS LESBIANS? After seeing Bonnie dance, Mona says she's pretty, but it's otherwise pretty hetero. VERDICT: If you catch it in the right mood, you may dig its seriocomic fever-dream vibe, but its scattershot story and uncomfortable character choices sometimes frustrate.