For Reel

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

One can imagine that writer/director Nacho Vigalondo witnessed children stomping their way through the woodchips on a playground when he developed the idea for Colossal. These playground games—where the mundane becomes improbably massive in scale and children are rewritten as both heroes and monsters—are reimagined by Vigalando as the stage for brewed resentment and anger, the wrestling ring in which two personalities who are finally done exchanging harsh words will put up their fists and duke it out. It is the stage where two incredibly self-destructive people will become literally destructive to each other… as well as, as this is a Vigalando movie, the country of South Korea. Despite its instantly lovable premise, Colossal is surprisingly earnest and even sad in its delivery—the kaiju which appear over the city are personal demons literally manifested, and the damage they cause is given some semblance of weight (that being said, Anne Hathaway’s detached guilt—she knows her avatar has killed many, but can hardly fathom it—plays as incredibly timely). Hathaway has played depressives in indies before, but Jason Sudeikis’ turn is genuinely surprising, inviting the comparison between his typical persona’s smarm with sheer, embittered entitlement.