Do me a favor. Go ahead and read the 2 or 3 sentence synopsis of this film’s plot on either LB or IMDB. Then close your eyes and quickly imagine in your mind’s eye what a movie with that description might look like and what you might expect to happen in it. I’ll wait.

I promise you that whatever you just came up with in your head is more creative and more interesting than anything that happens in the entirety of this complete and utter, generic waste of time.

I'm giving this 2 stars for the director's general competence. You know, keeping boom mics out of the frame, pointing the camera toward the actors instead of at the wall, basic continuity.....

Even the title just screams that the team behind this was thinking outside the box, doesn’t it?

Doesn't the poster look like Newt from Aliens?
They mostly come at night. Mostly.

After seeing The Strangers for the first time recently, I wanted to catch up on Bryan Bertino's filmography. Will check out Mockingbird next.

This was so wrongly marketed. No no, this was by no means a horror movie. On the other hand, it was an out and out family drama. I'm not implying it would have changed the eventual mediocrity of the whole experience, but it would have helped to keep the expectations under radar.

Zoe Kazan and Ella Ballentine deserved better for they were the only shining stars in this effortlessly scripted indie misfire. Woefully underwritten, messily paced and stuck in its own trap of genre blending, The Monster is neither scary nor intelligent.

i get the metaphor thing but also that monster is exactly what i look like in real life

It's sorta like Cujo minus the dog & good performances.

I would have rated this 5-stars if in the end, the mom sits up and looks at her daughter, asks "are you scared?" and as her daughter looks at her with huge bewildered eyes, mom smiles & says, "Well, you should be. Your'e on Scare Tactics."

Yet another boring horror thriller from grossly overrated writer and director Bryan Bertino after The Strangers and Mockingbird, The Monster has stunning cinematography, decent practical creature effects, and strong performances from Zoe Kazan and Ella Ballentine going for it but absolutely nothing else, whether it be an engaging story, interesting characters, actual scares, or a sense of pacing.

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Mother and daughter??? They looked like sisters and the way they treated one another I thought they might as well be. 

The relationship between them was so wack.

Not even the monster was any good, super disappointing for a movie called ‘The Monster’ 

I will say, the mother and daughter had a real personal moment towards the end and that was possibly the best part of the whole movie. And the young girl was actually very good, she gave a lot of emotion. The last 25 minutes were pretty good, the rest... not so much.

I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot of very average and uninspired things in here, the creature design for one, but what this film does well, that a lot of horror films don’t, is to get you to see the characters as more than just pawns to be killed off by a monster. They are real people, with real flaws, and that is an impressive feat.

Cool monster design.

Excellent use of horror tropes to tell a deeper story about the relationship between a young mother and her estranged daughter.  It might've been boring or trite in less capable hands, but the two excellent lead performances make it easy to engage and empathize. 

Splinter meets Cujo

there’s a difference between loving your child and being a good parent and I think this movie captures it perfectly

Well shot and well acted, I thought the tension of the mother/daughter being trapped in a car with this creature (which looks fine, if sorta uninteresting and Venom-like) creeping around outside was undercut with all the flashbacks to their fucked-up relationship, which while interesting character moments, seemed to really take away from the suspense. The pace is messy and there is opening and closing narration that is completely unneeded, but even with the complaints, there are some terrific moments in this and the dramatic beats might make you sad (your milage may vary). On Netflix now.